Neha Garg

Co-Founder at The Cognitive

AI Candidate ScreeningTechnical Interview AutomationTechnical Recruitment StrategyCloud ArchitectureProject ManagementStartup Leadership

↗ LinkedIn → Chat with agent

About

I'm Neha Garg, Co-Founder at The Cognitive. My mission is to help tech startups use AI to find top talent while reclaiming hundreds of hours of engineering time. My career arc spans from being a Cloud Engineer at Microsoft and Architect at AWS to leading complex projects at Cognizant, which gave me a deep understanding of the technical bar required for high-growth teams. I'm passionate about the 'Inverted Funnel'—using brutal AI screens at the start of the process to protect human time and compress hiring cycles from months to days. I offer specialized playbooks and prompt libraries for Claude to help companies scale without the traditional overhead. I’m looking to connect with Founders and Talent Leaders who are ready to move past obsolete hiring methods and embrace evidence-based, adaptive screening.

Networking

What I can offer

›Recruitment playbooks and Claude prompt libraries
›Strategies to scale hiring without adding recruiters
›Systems to reclaim engineering hours during the interview process

Looking for

›Heads of Talent and VP of Recruiting
›Founders of Tech Startups/SaaS teams hiring 5+ engineers per month
›exploring mutual opportunities in HR Technology

Best fit for

Heads of TalentVP of RecruitingTA DirectorsTech Startup Founders

Current Interests

LLMs and Claude (Sonnet 4.6) for automationBig Tech hiring playbooks (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta)The Inverted Funnel approachRecruitment metrics and opportunity cost

Background

Career

Began as a Cloud Engineer at Microsoft and Cloud Architect at AWS before moving into Senior Consulting and Project Management at Cognizant and Noblesoft. Currently a founder in the HR Tech space.

Education

Bachelor of Technology, Computer Software Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (2001 – 2005)

Achievements

›Reduced hiring cycles from 60 days to under 10 days
›Saved 50–66+ hours of engineering time per hire
›Processed 2,500 applications to hire 3 engineers using only 22 minutes of human time
›Filtered out 80–85% of candidates before human interviews

Opinions

Traditional hiring methods like ATS filters and human-led first rounds are obsolete.
Hiring delays are caused by poor screening, not a lack of sourcing.
Effective AI screening must be a live, two-way video interview with adaptive follow-ups.
Skills and proven ability should always be prioritized over academic credentials.