Mercor now works predominantly with some of the largest AI labs and tech companies in the world, including OpenAI and Meta, to screen talent using their AI interview and staff them on short-term contracts. “Initially, we were just placing tech grads in India with startups run by our contemporaries,” said Virat Talwar, a product manager at Mercor, and its first employee, “but not long after, we realised that we could generalise the products we had built to a much larger market.”. Products spearheaded by Talwar and the Mercor team have now processed close to 500,000 applicants, placing over 5,000 people around the world in part-time and full-time opportunities.
A large amount of the contract work that members of Mercor’s talent pool now do revolves around evaluating the capabilities of AI models, and working on projects that help cutting-edge AI researchers. Talent on the platform is global, while they have people from the US, Europe, and Latin America, a large part of the talent pool is based in India. In fact, around half of the company’s internal team is based in India. “The benefit of starting with an Indian talent pool is that we were able to attract and hire some of the best young Indian tech talent internally,” says Talwar, who is based in San Francisco but grew up in Delhi before moving abroad to study at Harvard University.
One of the members of the team based in India is Soumi De, the company’s Head of Sourcing. She helps support the global sourcing strategy that fuels Mercor’s AI marketplace, playing a pivotal role in building the supply engine that matches thousands of candidates to cutting-edge AI opportunities. “Our goal is simple but ambitious: to deliver the right talent at the right time, every time,” said De. “We’ve built an adaptive sourcing system that’s designed not just for growth, but for precision and velocity.”
“Growing up in India and majoring in computer science, I saw how disconnected hiring often is from actual job performance first-hand,” said De. “Top-tier talent would get overlooked because they didn’t ‘crack’ the process, while others who performed well in interviews didn’t always thrive on the job.”
Mercor is now focusing on creating a talent experience shaped by a deeply practical approach to sourcing. “Traditional recruiting needs to adapt. It shouldn’t be about jumping through hoops; it should be about capability, clarity, and match. That’s what we’re building at Mercor.” De believes this shift isn’t just progressive, it’s inevitable. “Companies can’t afford the inefficiencies of outdated processes anymore. Mercor is ahead of the curve in shaping a modern hiring ecosystem, one where both companies and candidates win.”
As the hiring landscape continues to evolve, Mercor’s model is proving that a more equitable, performance-based approach isn’t just idealistic, it’s operationally sound and commercially necessary. Mercor is not just riding the future of work, it’s helping build it.
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