What happens when AI moves from helping job candidates to evaluating them? HackerRank, a platform used by companies to assess and hire developers, is offering a glimpse at what that future of job interviews could look like with Chakra, an AI agent that conducts interviews, observes candidates as they work, and evaluates not just their answers but how they got there. After around six months in beta, HackerRank is making Chakra generally available to its customers on Monday.
The startup says the AI interviewer has already conducted more than 500,000 interviews during testing, with companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among those that tried it, while HackerRank also tested the product internally. AI has been a staple in job interviews for some time, with companies using voice agents and other automated tools to screen candidates and make the hiring process more efficient. Job seekers, meanwhile, have increasingly gained their own AI tools to help them navigate interviews, sometimes without employers knowing.
With Chakra, HackerRank is betting AI can change not only how interviews are conducted, but also what employers can measure. Beyond whether someone arrives at the right answer, the startup wants to assess harder-to-capture signals such as critical thinking and judgment, as well as what it calls “AI fluency” — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution. In practice, a Chakra interview is designed to look more like doing the job than taking a traditional coding test.
A candidate gets a task involving a real-world code repository, and they work through it in a canvas that includes an AI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra can use the context of what they are doing to ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose one approach over another, or how their solution would change if a new constraint were introduced. Ravisankar told TechCrunch that Chakra is changing the basic structure of the hiring process itself.
What previously involved three separate rounds, comprising a recruiter screen, take-home assessment, and follow-up interview with an engineer, is now combined into a single Chakra interview, he said. Giving candidates access to AI during an interview might seem to make it easier to cheat. However, HackerRank says it found the opposite.
Suspicious-activity flags, Ravisankar said, were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments, though the rate varied depending on factors such as geography and seniority. Ravisankar told TechCrunch that giving candidates access to AI reduces the incentive to secretly use outside tools that can feed them answers during an interview. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012, HackerRank built its business around coding challenges, eventually helping companies assess and hire developers based on their technical skills.
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