HackerRank launches Chakra, an AI interviewer for job candidates

HackerRank is making Chakra, its AI interview agent, generally available to customers on Monday after around six months in beta, during which it conducted more than 500,000 interviews. Companies including Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini tried the tool, alongside HackerRank’s own internal testing. The startup, which already serves more than 3,000 business customers including Amazon, Nvidia, Clay and Replit, built its coding-assessment business around technical tests, but says AI has made that earlier model less useful for measuring engineering ability.

A Chakra interview is designed to look more like doing the job than taking a coding test. Candidates get a task involving a real-world code repository and work through it in a canvas that includes an AI assistant; as they work, Chakra can ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose one approach over another or how their solution would change under a new constraint. Co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said the tool is meant to evaluate not just whether a candidate reaches the right answer but the judgment behind it, including what he calls “AI fluency” — how well someone frames a problem for AI, judges its output and steers it toward a solution. “The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output,” he said, adding that because AI lets anybody produce a polished result, employers now need to understand the thinking behind it.

Ravisankar said Chakra also collapses what used to be three separate hiring steps — a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment and a follow-up interview with an engineer — into a single interview. Despite candidates having AI access during the interview, HackerRank says suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in its traditional assessments, though the rate varied depending on factors such as geography and seniority. Ravisankar said giving candidates sanctioned AI access reduces the incentive to secretly use outside tools that could feed them answers.

Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012, the Y Combinator-backed startup now serves a community of over 30 million developers worldwide. Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make the final hiring decision, which Ravisankar said remains with humans; AI can consistently apply an employer’s criteria, while human interviewers spend more time on fit and questions about the company and role. But applying the same criteria consistently does not make a system free of bias — automated hiring tools can inherit or amplify bias from the data and criteria used to build them, and regulators including New York City already require bias audits and candidate notice for certain automated employment tools, a requirement Ravisankar acknowledged HackerRank has had to build for.

Why it matters

As AI plays a bigger role in scoring rather than just assisting candidates, employers face a harder question: how much of a hiring decision to delegate to an algorithm, even one its maker says is less biased than a human reviewer.