Mehul Bhatt

The Uber for interviews, except the drivers are engineers with fifteen years of experience.

The FloCareer pitch is easy to say and expensive to build. A hiring company posts a role. Somewhere on the other side of the world, a vetted freelance interviewer — a working senior engineer, usually — takes the first round on the company's behalf, on video, on a schedule the client did not have to negotiate. FloCareer's software records it, structures it, scores it, and hands the hiring manager a report. AI handles the plumbing: scheduling, proctoring, fraud detection. Humans handle the judgment. Bhatt is emphatic about this split.

"I don't think interviewing would be fully automated," he told the Behind Company Lines podcast. "At least not in near future." Which is a slightly unusual sentence to hear from the CEO of an AI-forward interview company, and slightly less unusual once you notice how many CEOs of AI-forward interview companies say approximately the same thing. Judgment is the last mile. FloCareer sells the first mile at scale.

The business model resembles a staffing agency crossed with a SaaS company, which is to say it resembles nothing in particular and has to invent its own category. FloCareer calls that category "interview-as-a-service." Analysts have followed. Competitors — eTeki, InCruiter, Screenify — have followed. Enterprise buyers, who are the ones who actually matter, have been following since around 2020.

The company has now, per its own count, run over one million interviews. Six hundred plus clients. A hundred and thirty employees. Headquartered at 100 Summit Drive in Burlington, Massachusetts — a business-park address that says less about the company than the Bangalore delivery hub, which says more. FloCareer is a two-hub operation. The sales conversation is in Massachusetts. The interviewing infrastructure is in India. The interviewers themselves are everywhere.

Sixteen years an individual contributor. Then a CEO title. No intermediate steps.

Most founder stories run through a management ladder. Bhatt's does not. He completed his Master of Science in Computer Systems Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in 2000. From there he moved into engineering roles: startups first, then Cisco, where he worked as a Solutions Architect, a Technical Leader, and a Virtualization Architect supporting pre-sales teams across the Asia-Pacific region between roughly 2009 and 2014. He was, by his own account, an individual contributor the entire time. Never a people manager.

This is the unusual biographical fact that makes the rest of FloCareer make sense. If you have spent sixteen years being the person the hiring manager keeps pulling into interview panels — the senior IC who is expected to donate two hours a week, indefinitely, to evaluating strangers — you eventually develop a specific and non-theoretical view of what is broken about hiring. Bhatt developed his. Then he built a company to fix it for other senior ICs at other companies, so they could stop donating those two hours a week too.

He has cited, in interviews, two mentors who sit at oddly high altitudes: an early streaming-protocol pioneer he refers to only as Frederick, and Ed Bugnion, one of the co-founders of VMware. He mentions them the way most people mention a former manager. This is a data point about the room he has spent his career in.

The people who paid first were not the people he expected.

Bhatt assumed tech companies would be his first customers. Tech companies have the interview problem in its purest form — endless senior engineers pulled off endless roadmaps to grade endless candidates — and so it seemed obvious that they would buy first. They did not. Services firms bought first. Companies that bill their engineers to clients by the hour, and therefore treat every hour spent screening resumes as a direct hit against revenue.

This is one of those go-to-market discoveries that reads, in retrospect, as obvious, and in the moment as not obvious at all. It is also one of those discoveries that a founder tends to remember specifically because it required him to update his mental model of the market in real time. He has told the story more than once since.

The CEO runs long. Also deep.

Bhatt hikes, camps, dives and runs long distances. He reads astronomy and theoretical physics for fun. He describes himself as a futurist. None of this is unusual in the Bay Area or Boston tech scenes, where every third executive owns a wetsuit and every second one is training for something. What is faintly unusual is how little of it appears on his LinkedIn. This is a CEO whose public surface is deliberately narrow. The hobbies come up in podcasts, not in press releases.

The company he built is likewise narrow in what it says about itself. FloCareer does not brand as an AI company, though its stack is AI-heavy. It does not brand as a marketplace company, though its interviewer bench functions as one. It brands as a service, which is closer to what it actually is, and closer to how enterprise HR buyers actually shop.