[100 Emerging Women Leaders] After fighting for her dream, Nikita Gupta is helping others achieve theirs
Nikita Gupta is the Co-founder of FAANGpath (now Careerflow), an AI-enabled tech platform that helps job seekers create the best resumes and land jobs.
As a senior technical recruiter at Uber and the co-founder of FAANGpath (now Careerflow), Nikita Gupta helps thousands of people to land their dream jobs.
Gupta started
in 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when she was moving to the US from Singapore. As a job seeker then, she knew how rejections can sometimes take a toll on people’s mental health and motivation.Careerflow helps job seekers improve their chances of getting hired by bringing in top managers, engineers, and product people to review their existing resumes and give feedback on building a top resume.
Gupta understands and relates to people who fight their way to achieve their dreams. At one point, she was also fighting for hers against her family’s pressure to get married.
“The discussions about my marriage began at a very early age, especially when I was in my third year of my Bachelor’s. Every time those conversations arose, I became more determined to become financially independent and prove myself,” Gupta recalls.
“Today, every woman in my family takes me as a role model, and I am the first woman in my family who has continued pursuing her career after her marriage,” she adds.
As someone who has experienced gender-based biases in her personal and professional lives, Gupta ensures to call it out whenever she gets the opportunity.
“Once I was tasked to recruit for a company, and the senior manager said the client wants to recruit women because of ‘diversity reasons’. It baffled me that people were recruiting women just to show the numbers and not for their skills,” Gupta shares.
It is not always easy to stay unaffected by biased comments. Gupta advises women to have a strong self-perception to overcome them.
“I have heard people tell me that I got the promotion because I am a woman and that I won’t be able to continue for long as a woman entrepreneur. It took me years to build the kind of confidence and self-love that today helps me overcome such comments,” she says.
“Women need to understand and believe in their capabilities and love themselves. Only then can they come out of the stigma attached to them. Own up to your failures, fix the mistakes, and just take the plunge,” Gupta concludes.
Edited by Suman Singh