HackerRank, a platform used by companies to assess and hire developers, has launched Chakra, an AI agent that conducts interviews and evaluates candidates based on not only their answers but their problem-solving process. After around six months in beta, the tool is now generally available to customers starting Monday.
The startup says Chakra has already conducted more than 500,000 interviews during testing. Companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini have used the product, and HackerRank also tested it internally.
Chakra is designed to assess harder-to-capture signals such as critical thinking and judgment, as well as what HackerRank calls "AI fluency" — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution.
"The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output," HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said in an interview. "Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact." The question for employers, he said, becomes whether they can understand the thinking and judgment that went into producing it.
In practice, a Chakra interview presents a candidate with a task involving a real-world code repository and an AI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra uses the context to ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose one approach over another or how their solution would change if a new constraint were introduced.
AI has already been used in job interviews for some time, with companies employing voice agents and other automated tools to screen candidates. Job seekers have also increasingly used AI tools to help them navigate interviews, sometimes without employers knowing.