HackerRank’s AI interviewer offers a glimpse into what job interviews could become

HackerRank is making Chakra, an AI agent that conducts interviews and evaluates candidates, generally available to its customers. The company said the product has been in beta for around six months, during which it conducted more than 500,000 interviews.

Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini were among the companies that tried Chakra, and HackerRank also tested it internally, according to the company.

Chakra is designed less like a traditional coding test and more like doing the job. A candidate receives a task involving a real-world code repository and works through it on a canvas that includes an AI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra can use the context of their activity to ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose a particular approach or how a solution would change under a new constraint. The company says it wants to assess signals such as critical thinking, judgment, and what it calls AI fluency: how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution.

Co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said the previous mode of evaluation focused on output, and that with AI anyone can produce an artifact, so the question for employers becomes whether they can understand the thinking and judgment behind it. He said a process that previously involved three rounds is now combined into a single Chakra interview.

On cheating, Ravisankar said suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments, though the rate varied by factors including geography and seniority. He said giving candidates access to AI reduces the incentive to secretly use outside tools.

Ravisankar said Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make the final hiring decision, which remains with humans. He argued AI can apply an employer's criteria consistently and is less biased than humans if tuned properly, while human interviewers can spend more time assessing fit and answering candidate questions.

The article notes that applying criteria consistently does not necessarily make an AI system free of bias, and that automated hiring tools can inherit or amplify biases from data, models, and criteria. It also notes New York City requires employers using certain automated employment decision tools to undergo an independent bias audit and notify candidates, and that Ravisankar acknowledged hiring is a regulated area.

HackerRank launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012 and now has more than 3,000 business customers, including Amazon, Nvidia, Clay, and Replit, and a community of over 30 million developers, according to the article. Ravisankar compared the shift internally to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone and said Chakra is going to be the headline and the way the company will move forward.