Talent Acquisition Intern

Profound is building the infrastructure that changes how professionals get hired. On one side, candidates get represented accurately. On the other, hiring managers get matched to people who actually fit. The belief is that hiring is broken at both ends, and the fix is a platform that works for both parties at once.

Profound operates as a services and product company. The services side runs live mandates for funded startups; the product side is the matchmaking engine underneath it all.

The team is small, early, and Seed-funded, led by operators who move fast and expect the same from everyone around them.

As a Talent Acquisition Intern at Profound, you will own sourcing capacity across multiple live mandates simultaneously.

You will run twenty candidate conversations a day across four active roles, convert those into completed Profound calls, and own the pipeline end to end. The role asks for Boolean search proficiency, the ability to evaluate technical fit across backend and ML roles, and the hustle to pitch both the role and Profound to candidates who are not yet looking.

You will work directly with Saadat, Profound's founding team member leading talent.

You will carry four live mandates from day one. Here is what that means in practice:

• Pipeline across four mandates. Source, engage, and qualify candidates across four active roles simultaneously, every day.
• Twenty conversations daily. Run a high volume of outbound conversations and convert them into seven to eight completed Profound calls per day.
• Technical fit evaluation. Assess backend, ML, and data candidates on how the functions connect, not just keyword matching.
• Candidate pitching. Sell both the role and Profound to candidates who need a reason to take the call.
• Boolean search execution. Run structured LinkedIn searches to find candidates the obvious query misses.
• Blocker ownership. When the pipeline runs thin, diagnose and fix it before flagging it up.

• Sourced candidates before, at a startup. You have at least two internships under your belt, totalling six months or more, at a Seed to Series B company.
• Boolean search is already in your toolkit. You have used structured LinkedIn search operators and know how to build a query that finds the right person.
• You understand how tech roles connect. You can explain what a backend engineer does differently from a data engineer, and why that matters when evaluating a candidate.
• You know the Bangalore startup ecosystem. You can name which companies are actively hiring and where the talent concentrates, without needing a ramp-up.
• You pitch, not just screen. You can make a candidate who was not looking take a call, because you know how to frame the opportunity.
• You own problems before escalating. When a pipeline runs dry, you try three things before asking for help.

• Start with the data. If you say the pipeline is thin, show the numbers. Claims without evidence do not land here.
• Flag blockers early, not late. Raise a problem the moment you hit it, with what you have already tried.
• Own the output, not the activity. Conversations are the input; completed Profound calls are the output. That is what gets measured.
• Move without being nudged. Follow-through is the baseline expectation, not a differentiator.
• Learn the ecosystem, use it. Know which Bangalore startups are hiring, which are not, and where the right candidates are sitting right now.
• Work in person. The team is on-site in Bengaluru; that is where the work happens.

Stipend of ₹2.3L to ₹3L per year. You work directly with Profound's founding team on live mandates across the Bangalore startup ecosystem. The role puts you at the center of a Seed-stage hiring platform being built from the ground up.