The problem I kept seeing
I've watched this happen too many times. A strong engineer — someone who's shipped real products, contributed to open source, built things people use — applies to a startup job. Their resume gets filtered by a recruiter who doesn't know the difference between React and React Native. Rejected.
Meanwhile, the engineering manager at that same startup is frustrated. They've interviewed 15 candidates sourced through recruiters and none of them have the right depth. The recruiter was selecting for resume keywords, not for the actual skills the EM needed.
The recruiter isn't malicious — they just don't understand the technology. And they're not supposed to. But when they sit between the engineer and the EM, both sides lose.
Why the recruiter model persists despite being broken
Recruiters charge 8–15% of a placed candidate's annual salary. For a ₹30 LPA engineer, that's ₹2.4–4.5 lakh per hire. This creates a powerful incentive for the recruiting industry to maintain its gatekeeping role — and very little incentive to optimise for match quality.
Job boards perpetuate this by charging companies for posting and candidates for premium visibility. The board doesn't make more money when a great match happens — they make money when the pipeline is big and both sides keep paying. Misaligned incentives all the way down.
"The best hiring I've done was when I talked directly to the candidate. The worst was when everything was mediated through a recruiter." — This sentiment, repeated by nearly every EM I spoke to while building Switchly.
What happens when you remove the middleman
When an engineer applies directly to an engineering manager, something interesting happens: the quality of conversation goes up immediately. The EM can ask technical follow-ups in their first message. The engineer can ask about the actual technical challenges they'd be working on. The signal-to-noise ratio is completely different.
But "apply directly" alone isn't enough. EMs don't have time to read 200 resumes. That's the real reason they use recruiters — not because recruiters are better at evaluating technical candidates, but because the volume problem is real.
This is where AI actually solves a real problem. If you can rank candidates by actual skill match — not keyword match, not recruiter intuition — and present the top 10 to the EM with context, you get the best of both worlds: low volume for the EM, direct access for the candidate.
Why I built this specifically for India
The Indian startup ecosystem has exploded — hundreds of well-funded product companies are hiring engineering talent. But the hiring infrastructure hasn't kept pace. Most companies still rely on Naukri (built for a completely different era) or LinkedIn (designed for a US market) or expensive recruitment agencies.
Indian engineers are underpaid relative to the value they create — partly because they don't have negotiating leverage when a recruiter controls the conversation. Direct access to hiring managers is also direct access to honest conversations about compensation.
The country is producing extraordinary engineering talent. The bottleneck is the matching layer, not the talent.
What Switchly is, and what it isn't
Switchly is a direct-hire platform for engineers and the hiring managers who actually want to talk to them. You upload a resume once. Our AI parses it into a structured skills profile. You apply to jobs where you match well. Your application lands in the EM's dashboard — ranked against other applicants — not in an HR inbox.
We don't charge candidates. We don't have a "premium visibility" tier where paying candidates appear higher. We don't make money by increasing application volume — we make money when companies successfully hire, which means our incentives are aligned with match quality, not quantity.
We're building toward a world where the best engineer for a role finds that role — regardless of whether they had the right recruiter's phone number.