HackerRank opens Chakra, an AI interviewer that runs coding rounds on real repositories

HackerRank is releasing Chakra, an AI interviewer that replaces several rounds of a technical hiring process with one conversation, TechCrunch reported on 5 October. According to the report, the product moves out of a six-month beta and into general availability, with the company giving 7 October as the date. No independent testing of it had been published when this was written.

HackerRank says Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews during the beta. Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini were among early testers, TechCrunch says. Candidates work through real-world tasks inside a code repository, using an AI-assisted canvas, and the system asks follow-up questions as they go, according to HackerRank's description of how it works.

Chief executive Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that suspicious-activity flags were "70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments." He said rates varied by geography and seniority. That is the company's own comparison, and the report gives no detail on how a flag is defined or how the two sets of interviews were matched.

HackerRank says Chakra scores more than correct answers. It rates critical thinking, judgment and what the company calls "AI fluency": how a candidate frames a problem for an AI tool, checks what comes back and steers it. Ravisankar said "AI is way less biased than humans, if you tune it properly," while acknowledging that hiring is regulated and compliance is required.

TechCrunch says HackerRank was founded in 2012, launched at its Disrupt conference, and counts more than 3,000 business customers, among them Amazon and Nvidia, plus a community of 30 million developers. The claims about bias and cheating come from the company's chief executive, and the report does not cite any outside audit of Chakra's scoring.