HackerRank launches AI interviewer Chakra to judge candidates' thinking, not just answers
Developer assessment platform HackerRank is making its AI interview agent Chakra generally available after a roughly six-month beta in which it conducted over 500,000 interviews. The tool evaluates how candidates reason through problems rather than just whether they reach the right answer.
HackerRank, a platform companies use to assess and hire developers, is rolling out general access to Chakra, an AI interview agent that observes candidates as they work and evaluates their reasoning rather than just their final answers. The tool follows roughly six months in beta, during which it conducted more than 500,000 interviews, with companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini testing it alongside HackerRank's own internal use.
Unlike many existing automated screening tools that mainly check whether a candidate reaches a correct result, Chakra aims to measure harder-to-capture qualities such as critical thinking, judgment, and what HackerRank calls "AI fluency" — how well someone frames a problem for an AI system, evaluates its output, and steers it toward a solution. Co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said that because AI can now produce almost any output, employers need a way to assess the thinking behind it rather than the artifact itself.
In practice, a Chakra interview resembles real work more than a traditional coding test: candidates tackle a task involving an actual code repository inside a canvas that includes an AI assistant, while Chakra asks follow-up questions based on the choices they make along the way. Hiring managers receive a detailed report after the session.
Ravisankar said Chakra collapses what used to be three separate hiring stages — a recruiter screen, a take-home assignment, and a technical interview — into a single session. Although giving candidates AI access during an interview might seem to invite cheating, HackerRank says flags for suspicious activity were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews compared with its traditional assessments.
The company says Chakra is built to score candidates, not make final hiring decisions, which remain with human interviewers. Founded in 2012 and now serving more than 3,000 business customers, including Amazon and Nvidia, HackerRank views Chakra as central to its future, with Ravisankar comparing the shift to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone.
Expanding AI's role in evaluating candidates, however, raises questions about bias and oversight. Regulators, including in New York City, already require independent bias audits for certain automated hiring tools, and HackerRank acknowledges it must comply with such rules.
