HackerRank has made Chakra, an artificial intelligence agent that conducts interviews with software engineers, generally available to its customers, betting that the way developers are hired needs to change now that AI can produce working code on demand.
Chakra flips the interview dynamic: instead of a coding test graded on the final output, candidates work through a software problem inside a real repository canvas while the AI observes, asks follow-up questions about their choices, and evaluates how they think. The company says the agent ran more than 500,000 interviews during roughly six months of beta testing, with Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini among the early testers, and that it tested the product on its own hiring as well.
From output to judgment
HackerRank co-founder and chief executive Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that the old model of evaluation — judging the finished product — has lost force because anyone can now generate an artefact with AI. What matters instead, he argued, is whether an employer can understand the thinking and judgment behind it. Chakra is designed to measure harder-to-capture signals: critical thinking, professional judgment, and what the company calls "AI fluency" — how well a candidate frames a problem for an AI assistant, judges its output and steers it toward a solution.
The format folds three familiar hiring stages — the recruiter screen, the take-home technical assessment and the live engineering interview — into a single session. HackerRank also reports an unexpected side effect: because candidates are allowed to use AI openly during the session, suspicious-activity flags fell by 70 to 80 per cent compared with its traditional assessments, as the incentive to reach secretly for outside tools disappeared. The company stresses that the AI scores and summarises; final hiring decisions stay with humans.
Sources:
HackerRank's AI interviewer offers a glimpse into what job interviews could become — TechCrunch
HackerRank launches Chakra AI interview agent — Oossa
Chakra flips the interview dynamic: instead of a coding test graded on the final output, candidates work through a software problem inside a real repository canvas while the AI observes, asks follow-up questions about their choices, and evaluates how they think. The company says the agent ran more than 500,000 interviews during roughly six months of beta testing, with Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini among the early testers, and that it tested the product on its own hiring as well.
From output to judgment
HackerRank co-founder and chief executive Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that the old model of evaluation — judging the finished product — has lost force because anyone can now generate an artefact with AI. What matters instead, he argued, is whether an employer can understand the thinking and judgment behind it. Chakra is designed to measure harder-to-capture signals: critical thinking, professional judgment, and what the company calls "AI fluency" — how well a candidate frames a problem for an AI assistant, judges its output and steers it toward a solution.
The format folds three familiar hiring stages — the recruiter screen, the take-home technical assessment and the live engineering interview — into a single session. HackerRank also reports an unexpected side effect: because candidates are allowed to use AI openly during the session, suspicious-activity flags fell by 70 to 80 per cent compared with its traditional assessments, as the incentive to reach secretly for outside tools disappeared. The company stresses that the AI scores and summarises; final hiring decisions stay with humans.
Sources:
HackerRank's AI interviewer offers a glimpse into what job interviews could become — TechCrunch
HackerRank launches Chakra AI interview agent — Oossa
