Eightfold AI CEO Wants Recruiters to Interview a Digital Twin First

Your next recruiter screening interview might not require you to show up at all. Ashutosh Garg, CEO of AI talent management platform Eightfold AI, predicts job seekers will soon be able to send their digital twin instead of attending the first-round conversation themselves.

Garg recently launched TwinCafe, a platform where candidates upload their résumé, LinkedIn profile, work samples, and other relevant documents to create an AI-generated version of themselves. The platform then generates a shareable link. Garg envisions candidates placing that link at the top of their résumé or LinkedIn profile, giving recruiters direct access to their digital double.

How Would a Digital Twin Change Hiring?

The idea is not simply to save candidates time. Garg believes digital twins could restructure how companies screen talent before a single human conversation takes place.

Under the current model, recruiters often spend much of an initial screening interview verifying information already written on a résumé. Garg points to a specific inefficiency: rather than spending the first 20 minutes of an interview walking through a résumé line by line, a recruiter could question the candidate's twin beforehand. The AI double could be probed on previous roles, skills, or gaps in a work history.

The recruiter would then reserve time with the actual candidate for the questions that genuinely require human judgment and interaction. The real interview, Garg argues, would shift from fact-checking to substance.

"My main motivation was that a résumé is so limiting," Garg said. A digital twin, he argues, can "fill in the blanks" on parts of a candidate's background that might otherwise raise questions — such as career breaks or moves between industries. Those are exactly the details that often get a candidate screened out before anyone speaks to them.

What Does This Mean for Interview Quality?

Garg frames the payoff as a better conversation, not just a faster process. If recruiters can verify résumé details by interrogating a digital twin in advance, the actual interview "could be a lot more focused on the human aspect versus the fact-check aspect," he said.

"The quality of the interview dramatically improves," Garg said.

For candidates, the pitch addresses a long-standing frustration: spending limited interview time defending paperwork rather than demonstrating capability. For recruiters, it promises to compress the verification stage that dominates early-stage hiring conversations.

Could Recruiters Send Their Own AI Agents?

Garg's vision extends further than pre-screening. He envisions a future in which a recruiter may not need to be present for the first screen at all. Instead, the recruiter could send their own AI agent to talk to the job seeker's digital twin — an entirely automated first-round interview between two machine representatives.

That setup, Garg argues, would allow recruiters to surface people a standard résumé would have rejected outright. A career gap or an unconventional industry switch, contexts a twin can explain, would no longer automatically end a candidacy.

It would also change the arithmetic of screening volume. If the first conversation costs neither party human time, the pool of people a company can realistically evaluate expands sharply.

"Why limit a screening to five candidates?" Garg said. "Why not interview everyone?"

Why It Matters

The proposal lands amid a broader shift in how companies use AI across the hiring pipeline. Garg's TwinCafe moves the technology beyond résumé scanning on the employer side — it puts an AI representative in the candidate's hands as well, effectively automating both ends of the first interview.

The open question is adoption. The model works only if recruiters choose to question a candidate's AI twin rather than the person, and if they trust the answers a résumé-trained model gives. Garg, for his part, is betting that the efficiency gains and the larger candidate pools will make the case on their own — and that the human interview, when it finally happens, will be worth the wait.