HackerRank’s AI interviewer offers a glimpse into what job interviews could become

HackerRank, a platform used by companies to assess and hire developers, is unveiling Chakra, an AI interviewer that conducts interviews, observes candidates as they work, and evaluates their answers, processes, and reasoning. After testing for six months, Chakra is now available to customers. During its testing phase, the AI interviewer conducted over 500,000 interviews, with major companies like Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini participating.

Chakra aims to assess harder-to-measure signals such as critical thinking, judgment, and so-called "AI fluency" — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI and steers it toward a solution. Rather than merely evaluating the output of a candidate's work, HackerRank hopes to understand the thinking behind it. During a Chakra interview, candidates tackle a real-world code repository task using an AI assistant in a canvas interface.

Chakra can follow up on the candidate's work with relevant questions, such as why a particular approach was chosen or how the solution would adapt to new constraints. Though AI-assisted interviews might raise concerns about cheating, HackerRank reports that suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews compared to traditional assessments.

The AI interviewer is seen by HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar as a shift in the hiring process itself, combining typically separate interview rounds into one Chakra interview. Ravisankar believes AI has made HackerRank's previous technical assessment model less relevant to measuring engineering ability. However, the integration of AI into hiring raises questions about the extent to which companies should delegate hiring decisions to algorithms.

While Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make final hiring decisions, concerns about bias, data and model quality, and potential regulatory scrutiny persist.