HackerRank makes its AI interviewer “Chakra” available: more than 500,000 job interviews during testing

HackerRank, the platform widely used by companies to assess and recruit developers, has made available to its clients “Chakra,” an artificial intelligence agent that conducts job interviews, watches candidates as they work and assesses not only their answers, but also the path by which they arrived at them. As TechCrunch reports, the general launch comes after about six months of beta testing, during which Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews — with companies such as Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini among those that tried it, while HackerRank also tested the product in-house.

With Chakra, the company is betting that artificial intelligence can change not only the way interviews are conducted, but also what employers can measure. Beyond whether the candidate reaches the correct answer, the startup aims to assess harder-to-capture signals, such as critical thinking and judgement, as well as what it calls “AI fluency” — the candidate’s ability to frame the problem for the artificial intelligence, to judge its output and to steer it towards a solution.

“The previous way of assessing assessed the output,” HackerRank co-founder and chief executive Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch. “Now, because of artificial intelligence, anyone can produce an output.” According to him, the question for employers becomes whether they can understand the thinking and judgement that went into producing that output.

Artificial intelligence has already become a common part of hiring processes, with companies using voice agents and other automated tools to select candidates and make recruitment more efficient. On the other hand, candidates themselves have gained artificial intelligence tools to pass interviews more easily, sometimes without employers’ knowledge. Chakra is presented precisely at this moment, when both sides of a job interview are armed with the same technology.