HackerRank is rolling out Chakra, an AI agent that conducts technical interviews and evaluates candidates not just on their answers but on how they arrive at them. In a Chakra session, candidates work through a task in a real-world code repository with an AI assistant available, while the system asks follow-up questions about their choices and reasoning. The company says Chakra has already completed more than 500,000 interviews during a six-month beta, with customers including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini.
According to HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar, Chakra collapses what used to be three separate hiring rounds—a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment, and an engineer interview—into one session. He argues that because AI now lets anyone produce an artifact, employers need to measure the thinking and judgment behind it. HackerRank also reports that suspicious-activity flags were 70–80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional assessments, suggesting that giving candidates access to AI reduces the incentive to secretly use outside tools.
Still, using AI to evaluate candidates raises questions about bias and regulation. Ravisankar says AI can be less biased than humans if tuned properly, but automated hiring tools can also inherit biases from their data and models. Regulators are already paying attention: New York City requires bias audits for certain automated employment decision tools. HackerRank says Chakra is designed to score candidates while leaving final hiring decisions to humans, and that it has built the product with compliance in mind.