Apna, an India-based recruitment marketplace operator, has appointed Kartin Narayan as CEO of its jobs vertical.
Narayan will lead Apna’s efforts to scale, strengthen employer partnerships, and accelerate the adoption of AI-powered hiring, a news release stated. He will be working closely with Nirmit Parikh, founder and group CEO of Apna.
Before joining Apna, Narayan was CEO of the staffing vertical of TeamLease, an India-based HR tech company and the parent of job board FreshersWorld — which, incidentally, is a competitor to Apna in a few areas of the recruitment value chain.
Apna said that in a 24-year career predominantly in financial and operational leadership, Narayan has worked with companies such as Vodafone-Idea, Cisco, and Bharti Airtel, consistently demonstrating the ability to build and scale large, complex organisations, forge deep industry partnerships, and deliver sustainable business outcomes.
Narayan said, “What excites me most is seeing how thousands of companies are now building and deploying their own AI recruiting agents on Apna’s platform, automating hiring conversations and finding the right candidates faster than ever before.”
The statement accords with Apna’s recent official launch of Blue Machines, a service that enables enterprises to deploy multilingual AI voice agents at scale. In August, Apna launched a Blue Machine-built multilingual AI calling agent that integrates with job listings.
On the core operations front, it debuted an AI-powered job interview preparation tool in June, before unveiling an AI-powered recruiter verification system to combat job scams, called ‘Apna Safety.’ These products are all developed in-house, part of the company’s proprietary stack.
Founded in 2019, Apna is headquartered in Bengaluru and has a presence in more than 900 Indian cities. It says more than 50 million job-seekers and 700,000 employers have used its services to date. It reduced its losses by 57.3% year on year to INR513 million ($5.8 million) in the 12 months to March 2024.
