KINGSHUK KHAN AND IKIGAI: MOVING TALENT IDENTIFICATION CLOSER TO TRUTH
Kingshuk Khan is building Ikigai to rethink talent identification — moving beyond resumes and interviews toward systems that reveal what people can actually do.
Hiring has always struggled with a structural problem: the inputs are easy to game and expensive to validate. Resumes compress careers into marketing copy. Interviews reward performance under artificial conditions. The result is a system that often selects for confidence and polish rather than capability — and that systematically misses people whose strengths do not fit the template.
Ikigai uses AI and behavioral assessment to help companies identify talent based on capability, not credentials. The philosophical stance is blunt: resumes are fiction, interviews are theater, and the market needs something closer to truth. "Truth" here does not mean a single score or a naive algorithmic verdict. It means better evidence: tasks, signals, and structured evaluation that reduce the gap between what a person can do and what a hiring process can see.
The company is Seed-stage with early revenue, reflecting organizations' willingness to pay for better hiring outcomes as talent markets remain competitive and skill needs shift faster than credentialing systems can adapt.
Ikigai is a bet that the next generation of HR tech will not be another dashboard of keywords, but infrastructure that helps teams measure real work — and that doing so is both a moral imperative and a competitive advantage.