After ‘18-hour CEO,’ Pristyn Care co-founder under fire for ‘toxic’ interview practices

Hot on the heels of ’18-hour work day’ CEO comes another controversy about toxic work culture. This one centres around a now-deleted LinkedIn post from Pristyn Care co-founder Harsimarbir Singh, who elucidated at length about the “interview hacks” used at the health-tech company to filter out candidates. Aforementioned “hacks” include making job-seeking candidates wait for 6 to 8 hours in office (ostensibly to test their patience), regularly scheduling interviews for Sunday and late at night or early in the morning, and even asking outstation candidates to show up in office the next day to test their “hustle”.

At a time when ‘hustle culture’ is already under fire for being nothing more than a euphemism for toxic work practices, this list of interview hacks at Gurgugram-headquartered Pristyn Care, when revealed on LinkedIn, invited massive backlash.

Although Harsimarbir Singh now seems to have deleted his offending LinkedIn post, screenshots of it are being widely-circulated and soundly criticised on Twitter and other social media platforms.
“If you work in Pristyn, get in touch with me and I'll happily help you get jobs at companies with better culture,” wrote one Twitter user.

Several others reiterated the offer, noting that a company which followed such unreasonable procedures at the interview stage would expect their employees to be available 24/7 for work.

In his post, Singh wrote: “Interesting interview hacks we used early on to filter for Special Driven people (right attitude).”

He went on to elaborate on the hacks – the first of which was calling up the candidate at 8 am.

Hack number two – scheduling a telephonic interview at 11 pm to find “late workers”.