Unlocking India's Talent: How 'Quest' Is Trying To Fix The Country's Credential-Obsessed Hiring Culture

Parth Mehta knew something was fundamentally wrong with the academic system.

Despite being a pretty good student of mechanical engineering at his college in Mumbai, Maharashtra, in the mid-2010s, a "frontbencher," as the term goes, with over 90 per cent attendance and excellent grades, he felt increasingly disconnected from his coursework. The theoretical lectures and perfunctory lab practicals were not feeding his hunger for real, applicable engineering knowledge and practice.

Since childhood, Mehta had dreamed of becoming an engineer. But when he finally reached engineering college, the reality fell short of his expectations. He was not satisfied with merely absorbing engineering theory and what passed for practicals in his college laboratories.

His salvation came through the college’s Formula Student club. In fact, that was the main driving force behind his choice of college, which boasted an excellent motorsport club. Here, students design and build actual Formula-style race cars for competition. Finally, this was engineering that mattered — complex problem-solving with tangible, high-stakes results.

The work was so fulfilling that when placement season arrived in his final year, Mehta made a radical choice: he opted out entirely, sitting out the college placements that his classmates desperately pursued.

"That was my protest against the education system," he recalls.

Of course, Mehta could afford this bold stance because he came from a relatively well-to-do family. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable decision to forfeit a benefit offered by a top college, one that would have immediately propelled him into a professional career or at least provided the peace of mind that comes with a guaranteed job after graduation.

Four months later, despite bypassing the traditional placement process entirely, Mehta landed a coveted position at a top Indian startup. His ticket was not his grades, attendance record, or the usual CV fillers like "I play the guitar" or "I won a quiz in class VII." It was his proven ability to solve hard problems through Formula Student competitions — his quest, if you will.

More importantly, it points towards a solution that three young professionals in Bengaluru are now developing.

The Quest Revolution

In a collaborative workspace in Bengaluru, three driven professionals — two techies and a designer — are building what they call "Quest," a platform that could fundamentally reshape how India matches talent with opportunity.

Their premise is deceptively simple: instead of judging candidates by grades and college pedigree, why not evaluate them by their ability to solve real-world problems that create public value?

Arnav Bansal, Shruthi Badri, and Apoorva Verma define a quest as "a hard technical challenge that takes a fortnight to solve, and demonstrates skill and excellence in an area, while creating public goods."

Since their public launch in May 2025, Quest has attracted a flood of participants tackling challenges ranging from tools for civic accountability to digital organisers for medical reports. The platform currently features six quests in its library. The best submissions are not just meant to earn recognition. They are supposed to fast-track creators directly to final-round interviews with carefully vetted startups, bypassing the traditional multi-round recruitment gauntlet.

But Quest’s ambitions extend far beyond streamlining recruitment. The platform represents a cultural revolution away from India’s credential-obsessed hiring practices towards a merit-based system that values demonstrated problem-solving ability over institutional pedigree.

It is an alternative to the traditional model of how one goes about trying to get hired. Instead of the familiar grind of entrance exams, semester tests, CV-building activities, and placement politics, Quest offers a direct path: solve a meaningful problem, prove your capabilities, get connected with the right opportunities.

The Bay Area Awakening

The inspiration for Quest emerged from a cultural observation made by its founders thousands of kilometres from India.

In 2016, while working as a product analyst at the data company LiveRamp in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Shruthi, a mathematics graduate from Amherst College in Massachusetts, noticed a difference in her Indian engineering colleagues working alongside her.

"I would see a lot of engineers come from India with a certain mindset, and then within two or three months, they would be totally transformed by the SF environment and suddenly be extremely high initiative," she recalls. "So many companies in the last couple of years have been started by Indians who studied in India and then went to the US and founded companies there, of a scope and ambition that you were just not seeing in India."

The transformation puzzled her. These were the same engineers who, back in India, seemed content to settle into relatively safe and stable jobs. Yet in Silicon Valley, they became proactive, enterprising, and willing to take significant risks. What was causing this dramatic shift?

The answer, Shruthi realised, lay in the fundamental difference between how the two cultures valued and recognised talent. In India, educational qualifications remain the dominant currency of professional respect. Proven problem-solving abilities, meanwhile, are typically met with polite "oh, that’s nice" responses but rarely translate into concrete opportunities.

"I was just surprised at how credential-oriented everything was here in India," Shruthi reflects, having later worked as an AI engineer at Vianai Systems. "Even in the US, a Harvard, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), or whatever degree might get you into a room, but nobody is saying what their SAT score is when they're 35. But people here at that age are saying what their IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) rank was. It just seemed so much more an important part of the culture here."

The revelation was simultaneously discouraging and hopeful. If the difference was primarily cultural rather than capability, then it could potentially be changed, and relatively quickly too.

"These same people, when they came to the US, were building entirely different companies and were able to be entirely different engineers. If it's something that can be switched in a month or two, it seems much more cultural and environmental and something that could be flipped quickly."

The Unconventional Journey

Shruthi’s insights found a natural resonance with Bansal, who had been contemplating similar questions about education and talent development for years prior.

When Shruthi and Bansal connected and began working together in 2018, their conversations crystallised around a shared frustration.

"This Quest thing had kind of been brewing for a while," Bansal explains. "We were having these conversations about how there are these three problems: we know too many founders who are trying to hire top talent and are just struggling to do that, and conversely, many college students just don't know how to really stand out or prove their skills because the colleges, the syllabus, the grades, and things like that don't really say a lot. And then founders of companies and folks in hiring positions don't really know how to judge any of this. It is a lack of discernment on both sides."

Bansal’s own journey embodied the limitations of traditional educational pathways. After completing school in Bengaluru, he made the unconventional decision to hold off on college for a couple of years. When he eventually entered university, it did not take long for him to drop out entirely. However, what followed was the beginning of a four-year adventure in engineering.

A summer internship at Replit, an American artificial intelligence (AI) company, turned into a richly productive experience that lasted from 2020 to 2024.

"Replit is one of the agentic coding platforms where you can describe the app you're trying to build and it will work with you and build it with you," Bansal explains. "I joined way back in the day when it was a team of eight people."

After leaving Replit in 2024, Bansal chose not to join another established tech company. Instead, he launched two great projects: Lagrange Point, a collective working on moonshot projects and fun explorations in Bengaluru, focused on "solving societal problems with technology, and accelerating the progress of industry," and Findparts, "a super fast search engine for finding electronics components in India" — an attempt to make it easier for hardware engineers to source the components they need for their projects.

Having experienced firsthand the dynamics of talent recruitment in both Silicon Valley's high-growth startup environment and India’s more traditional corporate landscape, Bansal was uniquely positioned to understand why Quest was needed.

Shruthi, too, after her stint at Vianai, chose to start up. She is building Kate — AI sales rep robots for retail stores. Having been on both sides of management, she felt the need to initiate Quest alongside Bansal.

While Shruthi and Bansal contributed cultural insights and technical experience, the team needed someone who could authentically present Quest to the public. Enter Apoorva, a designer who resonated deeply with the core mission of optimising talent discovery in India.

"It's something I deeply felt for — a model where, in a short span of time, you're encouraged to bring your best skills to the table and build something end-to-end. It becomes a living proof of your capabilities," Apoorva explains. "In India, so many young people are caught in the cycle of attempting entrance exams and facing school and college pressure, and placement anxiety. These systems often define your future before you've had a chance to explore who you really are or what you can create."

The three collaborators officially formed Quest’s core team in November 2024, beginning to give concrete form to ideas that had been percolating for years.

How Quest Actually Works

Quest operates on three fundamental principles, as Bansal outlines: solving "the problem of lack of discernment in hiring that employers feel, students themselves not being able to prove what they're able to do for employers, and, finally, we have lots of open challenges that anyone can handle."

The platform's current library features six carefully curated quests, each created by either Bansal or Shruthi. These are not arbitrary technical challenges — they are problem statements the team feels passionate about, designed to generate tangible public value.

Current quests include building a tool to identify who is responsible for civic problems, creating a scientific roadmap for research progress, and developing a digital organiser for medical reports.

The emphasis on public benefit is intentional and non-negotiable. Every quest outcome must be a tangible good — an app, website, research paper, or similar deliverable — with clear utility for the broader community, not merely a technical demonstration.

After participants submit their solutions, the Quest team conducts evaluations. Those who meet their standards get connected directly with founders and senior executives at companies in their carefully curated network, which currently comprises 20–30 startups that the team can personally vouch for. Instead of navigating multiple interview rounds, successful questers can find themselves entering the fast lane to final-round conversations.

"We can personally talk to the founders, and beyond that, we can reach many more through our network," Bansal explains. "There’s a bunch of companies that have reached out to us, who are looking to hire as well."

The team is deliberately selective about their recruitment partners, prioritising quality over quantity.

"For the companies, we would like to place some constraints around quality," Bansal notes. "One of the things that happens with, say, interns in India is that they’re given just the grunt work that nobody else on the team wants to do. And often they’re not given the best mentorship. So one of our goals with Quest is, because we know we’ll be finding some pretty high-quality people, we want to make sure that the companies they’re placed into have the capacity for mentorship, and there’s something interesting about the projects they might be working on."

The Spirit Of Quest

What sets Quest apart from traditional recruitment platforms is its philosophical foundation. The initiative is not designed primarily as a job-matching service. Rather, it is built around the belief that young talent should engage with meaningful problems for their own sake, with career opportunities flowing naturally from demonstrated excellence.

"The whole system kind of runs on goodwill, and on interest," Shruthi explains. "We try to say the main reason to do a quest is that you’re going to learn a lot doing it."

This approach appears to be working. Within weeks of launch, Quest attracted participants who were completing multiple quests not because they were desperately seeking employment, but because they were genuinely hungry to work on interesting problems.

"We’ve had multiple people already do multiple quests because a lot of people are just hungry to work on interesting problems," Shruthi notes. "And part of what we realised with Quest is that when you’re young, or at any age, and when you’re embarking on a new interest and you’re a novice at that thing, you are not going to know the best problem to work on. And part of how we formulate quests is if you do it, you’re going to make a lot of accelerated progress in learning about that specific thing."

As many as 60 people have officially started quests, and nine submissions have come in so far — and this is data spanning just two weeks, since when the team started collecting data.

The founders take pride in the fact that participants are not treating Quest as a transactional job portal.

"Nobody has asked us, ‘Hey, where’s my job?’ at least so far," Shruthi says. "That’s the spirit we want, that one is interested in it for itself. But beyond that, if somebody really wants a job, and they’ve done a great job on a quest, we’ll make our best effort to connect them. If one intro doesn’t work out, we’ll try our best to get them another. But we want the whole thing to not really be an entitlement thing, but just all run on goodwill."

A Recruiter’s Perspective

Anurag Choudhary embodies exactly the type of recruiter Quest aims to team up with. As co-founder of Riffle, a Bengaluru-based music tech startup launched eight months ago that recently raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, Choudhary faces the classic scaling challenge: finding exceptional talent without the resources for extensive recruitment processes.

"The way we describe Riffle is it’s a Figma for music," he explains, referencing the popular collaborative design tool. But building innovative music technology requires engineers who can think creatively and solve novel problems, and that’s exactly the type of talent that traditional recruitment filters often miss.

"I have always fought against the idea of only hiring from select colleges, and none of my engineers have a pedigree of sorts. Because that doesn’t matter," Choudhary says. "What really matters is how driven you are, how intelligent you are, and how you are able to solve problems."

Choudhary’s perspective on education and talent development was shaped by his own experience across two different systems, just as in the case of Bansal and Shruthi.

"I am a product of the American education system because the Indian education system failed me. And the only reason I could do my undergrad in a top college in the US was because I could afford it. It took 1/100th of the effort it takes to get into the top IITs in the CS (computer science) programme," he reflects.

The contrast with Indian hiring practices struck him immediately upon returning to Bengaluru. In America, he observed graduates from colleges well outside the elite tier easily securing positions at top companies, something that was rare in India’s prestige-obsessed market.

When Choudhary met Shruthi in early 2024 and subsequently connected with Bansal, their shared frustrations around talent discovery made collaboration inevitable.

"I wanted to find out the best way I could reach out to people who are not easily found otherwise. But at the same time, I didn’t have the bandwidth to go through a large hiring process. Because it’s a very small team and there’s so much to do. So I couldn’t imagine myself having 15–20 people at the same time. I wanted my funnel to be somewhat limited and more manageable."

What distinguishes Quest from other technical assessment platforms, according to Choudhary, is its comprehensive approach to problem-solving.

"It’s not simply a technical challenge. It adds the extra layer of how you define the product, what it could be, what’s the design language, all of those things, which are very relevant when I look at candidates."

Beyond recruitment, Choudhary appreciates Quest’s focus on creating public value.

"It made me want to also put some projects and quests there. We are currently figuring out the exact quest, but we are trying to make it such that even if it doesn’t result in a hire, it is still putting something out in the world that can be useful. In fact, I was curious to come up with even more things outside of Riffle as well."

However, he advises potential participants to think strategically about Quest’s long-term value.

Early Signals and Measured Growth

Just over a month since Quest's public launch, the initiative has generated significant interest and participation. The team has received numerous submissions, with some individuals attempting multiple quests. This is a strong signal that the platform is attracting genuinely motivated problem-solvers rather than casual job seekers.

"I think we’re just at the point where we’re going to start closing loops for some of the first few quests, and maybe folks will start getting hired, and we’ll start talking about the projects that they’ve built," Bansal explains. "So we’re still kind of learning about what it means to do this type of work."

The founders are deliberately proceeding at a measured pace, prioritising the quality of matches over rapid scaling. After successful placements begin, they plan to closely monitor outcomes.

"Let’s say if somebody ends up getting a job, within a month or two, we’ll be thinking about whether it was the right match for them or how things are going for them," Bansal notes.

This cautious approach reflects their commitment to proving the model works before expanding aggressively.

"The reason we’ve not poured gasoline on scaling this or doing crazy outreach and trying to get more people to do more quests is we’re just trying to validate how well this works and how good the submissions are and what type of effort it is to vet this. So we’re trying to figure out how well it’s working before we scale it."

Expanding Beyond Technology

While Quest’s initial focus on technology reflects the founders’ backgrounds and networks, their vision extends far beyond software engineering. The team is actively developing quests for diverse fields, though they acknowledge that different domains require different approaches.

"We think the model is quite applicable across fields," Bansal explains. "It’s obviously easier for us to get a start in tech, or in software even, because, by virtue of being in Bengaluru and having the circles we have, those opportunities are easy to find. And we know that the hiring market for technology has always been good for certain types of engineers. So tech is a good, strong starting foot, but there’s nothing that’s restricting Quest to be for engineers."

The challenge lies in adapting the quest format to different professional contexts.

"With journalism, with design, it’s all portfolio-oriented, right?" Shruthi notes. "In engineering, we’re trying to show the capacity to solve a hard problem, whereas in these areas the output should maybe show the range of the person. That’s something we’re trying to figure out."

The team is already contemplating applications in entertainment, literature, journalism, law, and other disciplines, though they recognise certain limitations.

"Of course, there are constraints in some areas, like we can’t really have quests in the medical profession unless it’s research," Bansal acknowledges. "But we kind of want to be very broad with this initiative."

The Bigger Cultural Shift

Quest’s ultimate ambition transcends efficient recruitment. The founders ultimately hope to catalyse a fundamental cultural transformation in how India recognises and develops talent. Their strategy involves proving the model works, then inspiring others to adopt similar approaches.

"We think that once this model works, we can scale, and also, the way things in India happen is if someone proves that something works and someone takes that initial validation effort, 10 people will be open to doing the same thing," Shruthi explains. "You’ll see this phenomenon in every area of life in India, whether it’s like one microbrewery opens up, and now there are 100. So we want to scale this, but, ultimately, our goal is to somewhat change how the system works. And if we think we do a great job proving this works, we think lots of others with greater positions of power and influence than us would be able to do this in their own ways."

Unlocking India’s Hidden Talent

The potential impact of Quest and similar initiatives extends beyond individual career trajectories to India’s broader economic development. The country’s talent is often undervalued and misallocated, with capable individuals lost in crowds of credential-focused applicants or deployed in roles that don’t use their capabilities well.

Choudhary believes Quest could help address this systemic inefficiency, particularly in smaller cities and towns where talent often remains invisible to opportunity.

"I think there’s so much untapped talent in Tier 2, 3 cities. If we really need to prevent the large brain drain we have in India, we have to activate the parts of India that were never even considered part of the brain. They were just sitting idle working on very low-impact projects at service-based companies. And India needs more product-based companies and more thinkers and believers, and that will come out of these underrepresented cities."

Early indicators suggest Quest is beginning to surface this hidden talent.

Full Circle: From Quest to Career

Parth Mehta’s journey from a college contrarian to Tesla engineer represents exactly what Quest aims to systematise. His path through Formula Student competitions was essentially a self-designed quest that proved his engineering capabilities in ways no résumés could capture.

"I found this channel through Formula Student, where I had the freedom to take those concepts from class, explore them the way I want, study more in detail about what I wanted to do, and apply all that as well," Mehta reflects.

His career trajectory after that pivotal decision validates Quest’s core premise. Following his startup experience at Ather Energy, India’s electric scooter manufacturer, Mehta pursued a master’s degree in Germany before landing his current role at Tesla.

"I honestly love the idea, and I think it’s necessary," Mehta says about Quest. "If the focus is on solving problems, then it’s in the right direction."

Quest’s founders are betting on the idea that India’s next generation of innovators is waiting for the right problems to solve. In a country where exceptional capability often remains buried under layers of credentialism, Quest offers a refreshingly direct proposition: prove yourself through your work, not your pedigree.

Whether this approach can scale from an underground movement in Bengaluru to a national mainstream movement remains to be seen. But with India’s startup ecosystem maturing rapidly and founders, especially in Bengaluru, increasingly prioritising demonstrated problem-solving ability over institutional prestige, Quest appears to have arrived at precisely the right cultural moment.