Hyring launches AI-powered English proficiency test with a rap-carnatic fusion song

AI recruitment automation platform Hyring has launched its English Proficiency Test alongside a fusion music track that blends rap with Carnatic classical music, turning a product release into a cultural moment.

The song lyrics walk through the everyday reality of India's hiring landscape, candidates who carry all the right knowledge but stumble when it's time to articulate it, and recruiters trapped in an endless cycle of screening calls that tell them everything about a person's confidence but nothing about their actual communication ability

But behind the music is a product that could genuinely shift how companies evaluate talent before they ever step into an interview room.

What is Hyring's English proficiency test?

India ranks 69th globally on the 2024 EF English Proficiency Index with a score of 490, placing the country in the low proficiency band.

According to the Pearson Global English Proficiency Report 2024, India's overall English skills score of 52 is below the global average of 57. The Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025 also reports that only 55.1% of Indian graduates are considered proficient in communication skills.

An Aspiring Minds study of 30,000 engineers across more than 500 Indian colleges found that three-quarters of them do not possess the spoken English skills required for jobs in the knowledge economy. The same study reported that 97% of engineers do not meet the English proficiency levels required for roles in corporate sales or business consulting.

More than 51% of engineering graduates are considered unemployable based on spoken English scores alone.

These findings highlight a gap between technical knowledge and communication readiness among many graduates entering the workforce.

Hyring's English Proficiency Test is designed as an AI-powered assessment to evaluate communication ability in professional environments rather than as a general academic language test.

Unlike traditional English proficiency assessments that focus mainly on grammar or reading comprehension, the test evaluates five communication dimensions that influence workplace communication.

1. Fluency

Fluency measures the ability to speak in connected sentences without excessive pauses or filler words. This type of communication is often required during team meetings, standups, presentations and discussions with colleagues or clients.

Research shows that men who speak fluent English in India earn 34% higher hourly wages than those who don't, and candidates with English skills above the local average command 30–50% higher salaries than similarly qualified peers without those skills.

Fluency isn't just a soft skill, it's a career multiplier.

2. Vocabulary

Vocabulary evaluates whether candidates have the professional word range needed to explain technical concepts, discuss timelines, escalate issues and communicate effectively in a business environment.

The Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025 found that employability in non-technical roles declined from 48.3% in 2023 to 43.5% in 2024, highlighting communication gaps among graduates.

3. Grammar

Grammar measures how accurately candidates construct sentences in written and spoken communication.

The Aspiring Minds study found that 61% of Indian engineers possess grammar skills no better than a Class VII student and 43% cannot write grammatically correct sentences in English despite holding engineering degrees.

In modern workplaces where emails, documentation and asynchronous communication are common, clarity in written communication becomes an important factor.

4. Pronunciation

Pronunciation measures whether spoken communication can be clearly understood across teams and regions.

The Pearson report noted that India's average English speaking score of 57 exceeds the global average of 54. However proficiency varies widely across regions and educational backgrounds.

The Aspiring Minds study also found that pronunciation and fluency are among the most significant barriers to effective spoken English among engineers. Only 6.8% of engineers were able to respond spontaneously in English with proper sentence construction.

5. Mother Tongue Influence

Mother Tongue Influence evaluates how a candidate's first language affects rhythm, intonation and sentence structure in spoken English.

India has approximately 265 million English speakers, most of whom use English as a second language. The English Proficiency Test measures this dimension to give recruiters additional context when evaluating communication ability.

Each candidate is assessed using a CEFR-based hiring assessment framework based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Scores range from A1 for beginner to C2 for advanced proficiency.

This framework is also used by EF Education First's proficiency index, which evaluates about 2.2 million test takers across 123 countries.

The assessment provides recruiters with a structured communication profile that can be compared across candidates, roles and geographies rather than relying only on informal interview impressions

The founders behind Hyring

The EPT didn't emerge from a boardroom brainstorm. It was born from years of watching the hiring process fail in the same way, over and over.

Adithyan RK started building companies before most people started thinking about careers. At fifteen, growing up in Chennai, he launched what would eventually become Domaincer, a digital agency that has now been running for 18 years, employing over 50 people across mobile development, cybersecurity, and digital marketing.

He didn't take the conventional route of college-to-corporate-to-startup. He skipped straight to building, learning the hard lessons about scaling teams and finding talent in real time, not in theory.

That experience, nearly two decades of hiring, managing, and watching great candidates get lost in a system that wasn't designed to find them, is what led to Hyring.

Today, Adithyan is a member of both the Forbes HR and Technology Council and brings a perspective to HR technology that's rooted in operator experience rather than academic frameworks.

Surya Nagarajan, Hyring's co-founder, is the technical architect behind the platform. A mechanical engineer by training with a deep obsession for artificial intelligence, Surya had been developing AI-based applications within Domaincer long before Hyring existed.

When Adithyan proposed the idea of building AI recruiting tools that could genuinely evaluate candidates the way a skilled human interviewer does, Surya didn't just see a product opportunity, he saw a chance to build something that could think, adapt, and assess at a scale no human team could match.

Together, they launched Hyring in 2024 with a clear belief: recruitment isn't broken because of a lack of candidates. It's broken because the tools used to evaluate them haven't kept up.

The problem the English proficiency test was built to solve

Before launching the English Proficiency Test, Hyring had already developed several AI tools used in early stage recruitment. These include an AI Video Interviewer, AI Phone Screener, AI Resume Screener and AI Coding Interviewer. Together these tools can replace up to two early rounds of human interviews by automating repetitive screening tasks so recruiters can focus on later stage evaluations.

As the platform expanded and processed more than 250,000 interviews across India, the United States and Dubai, the company observed a recurring pattern.

Many candidates passed technical assessments but faced difficulties when communication ability was evaluated later in the hiring process.

The macro data confirms what Hyring founders saw on the ground.

The Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025 found that overall graduate employability dropped from 44.3% to 42.6% in a single year, and the decline was driven almost entirely by non-technical skills, not technical ones. Employability in technical roles actually rose slightly, while non-technical role employability plummeted from 48.3% to 43.5%. India's talent can code, analyse, and build, but the system is failing to ensure they can communicate what they know.

This isn't a niche problem. In India's talent ecosystem, it's systemic. Millions of graduates emerge from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities every year with strong technical foundations, developers, engineers, analysts, and support professionals who are more than capable of doing the work.

But many of them haven't had the daily exposure to professional English that metro-city graduates take for granted. And the hiring process, as it stands today, has no reliable pre-employment English test to assess this before it becomes a problem on the job.

Here's what companies have been relying on instead: a quick phone call. Five minutes, maybe ten. A recruiter who has already spoken to twenty or thirty candidates that day makes a gut-level judgement about whether this person "communicates well enough."

Nervousness gets confused with a lack of ability. Regional accents get mistaken for poor English. And the entire assessment, one that could define a candidate's career trajectory, happens without any standardized criteria, any scoring framework, or any way to compare one candidate's communication skills against another's.

This can lead to two types of hiring errors.

The false reject - A technically excellent candidate from a smaller city gets passed over because they sounded hesitant on a call, even though they'd perform perfectly well in the actual role.

With over 51% of engineering graduates deemed unemployable based on spoken English scores alone, according to Aspiring Minds, the scale of talent being lost to this broken filter is enormous.

The false accept - A candidate who interviews confidently gets hired, only for the team to discover weeks later that their communication skills can't sustain the demands of the role. Client calls suffer. Collaboration slows down. And eventually, the hire doesn't work out, sending the company back to square one.

According to a Leadership IQ study, 46% of newly hired employees fail within 18 months, and communication mismatches are among the leading causes.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates a single bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee's first-year earnings. A study also found that 65% of companies report language barriers directly contribute to ineffectiveness, poor collaboration, and low productivity in the workplace.

Hyring's English proficiency test for hiring eliminates both failure modes. By providing a standardised, AI-driven communication assessment before the human interview stage, it aims to ensure that every candidate on the shortlist has been objectively evaluated for the communication demands of the role they're being considered for.

Why companies are paying attention

Hyring reports that more than 5,000 HR teams currently use its platform. Companies mentioned include IBM, TCS, Uber, Reliance, Meesho, Sobha and Worldline.

The English Proficiency Test integrates with the company's existing recruitment tools so organisations can include communication assessment during early hiring stages without changing their hiring workflow.

This may be particularly relevant for organisations hiring at scale such as BPO companies, IT services firms, global capability centres and SaaS companies operating with distributed teams.

Communication assessment may also be important for roles that involve interaction with international clients or collaboration with global teams.

The need for structured communication evaluation is not limited to large enterprises. Startups building remote teams, mid-size companies expanding into international markets and agencies placing candidates in client-facing roles often face the challenge of assessing communication ability before making hiring decisions.

Hyring's workplace English proficiency test provides a structured communication assessment based on measurable criteria. The company states that the test costs roughly $1 per assessment.

The EPT is designed to evaluate communication ability rather than function as a strict screening barrier.

Candidates are assessed using a CEFR-based hiring assessment framework, where different proficiency levels can be matched to roles with corresponding communication requirements.

For example, candidates with B1-level communication proficiency may be suitable for roles where moderate communication ability is sufficient, while roles requiring higher levels of communication may require C1-level proficiency.

The road ahead

With the launch of the English Proficiency Test, Hyring now offers a set of AI recruitment tools that include resume analysis, technical evaluation, phone screening, video interviews and communication assessment before human interviews take place.

According to the founders, the mission remains what it's always been. Not to replace recruiters, but to make sure that when a recruiter finally picks up the phone or walks into an interview room, they're meeting someone who belongs there, technically, culturally, and communicatively.

The English Proficiency Test and the accompanying music track have both been released as part of the product launch.