Nikhar Arora - Ahmedabad Mirror
As featured in Ahmedabad Mirror
Nikhar Arora's Ahmedabad Mirror interview tackles a statistic most career content avoids: graduates make up two out of three unemployed young Indians, and India's graduate unemployment rate runs several times the national average. The Arya by Mentoria co-founder's explanation isn't about candidate quality, it's a structural mismatch between what degrees promise and what the market is actually hiring for.
Why the silence isn't the candidate's fault
The interview's core argument is that most job seekers misdiagnose their own situation. Sending hundreds of applications into a portal and hearing nothing back isn't a sign of a weak candidate it's what a broken, high-volume funnel produces regardless of who's applying. In the piece, Nikhar traces this to how applicant tracking systems work: a single job posting can draw thousands of applications, so software filters candidates before a recruiter ever reads a résumé, and a strong applicant can be filtered out by a keyword mismatch with no explanation given.
What changes when a recruiter is reached directly
The most concrete finding in the Nikhar Arora Ahmedabad Mirror piece is about response speed. When an application reaches a recruiter through direct email rather than a portal queue, Nikhar says half of recruiter replies come back the same day, with a median response time under four hours. His conclusion: recruiters aren't unresponsive by nature, they simply never see most applications in the first place which is the specific gap Arya's recruiter-email and follow-up agents are built to close.
The practical advice: fewer applications, more targeting
Asked what a candidate six months into a fruitless search should do differently, Nikhar's answer is to narrow rather than widen pick a small number of genuinely wanted companies, find the actual hiring manager, and follow up consistently, since he notes a third of recruiter responses come from a second, third, or fourth contact. He also argues candidates should track replies and profile views as real progress markers, not just final offers, to avoid giving up before momentum shows.
Where the job market is headed
The interview closes on Nikhar's outlook for the next few years: graduate unemployment is likely to worsen without changes to employability preparation, and candidates already using AI tools like Arya are pulling ahead of those relying on manual applications alone, a gap he expects to widen across both freshers and working professionals.
Read the full Nikhar Arora Ahmedabad Mirror interview here: Ahmedabad Mirror.
