Half a Million Interviews In: HackerRank's AI Interviewer Chakra Goes GA, and It Wants to Replace Three Hiring Rounds With One

The AI interviewing arms race has a new general-release entrant. HackerRank, the coding-assessment platform used by more than 3,000 companies including Amazon, Nvidia, Clay, and Replit, said Monday that Chakra — its AI agent that conducts technical interviews end to end — is now generally available after around six months in beta. During testing, the company says, Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews, with Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among the early adopters.

Chakra's pitch is not just automating the old format — it's collapsing the pipeline. CEO and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that what previously took three separate rounds — a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment, and a follow-up interview with an engineer — is now combined into a single Chakra session. Candidates work through a task in a real-world code repository inside a canvas that includes an AI assistant, while Chakra asks follow-up questions in context: why this approach, how the solution changes if a new constraint appears.

The more interesting shift is what gets measured. "The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output," Ravisankar said. "Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact." So Chakra is built to grade the process: critical thinking, judgment, and what HackerRank calls "AI fluency" — how well a candidate frames a problem for an AI assistant, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution. In an era when every candidate has a model one tab away, that may be the skill actually being hired for.

The counterintuitive data point: letting candidates use AI appears to reduce cheating. Ravisankar said suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments — figures that are company-reported and not independently audited — with rates varying by geography and seniority. His explanation: when sanctioned AI use is on the table, the incentive to secretly run outside answer-generating tools evaporates.

HackerRank isn't shy about the cannibalization involved. Ravisankar compares the transition internally to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone — the old coding-challenge business that built the company still works, but the new product is where the market is going. "Chakra is going to be the headline," he said.

The open questions are regulatory and philosophical. AI hiring tools already face scrutiny — New York City, for instance, requires independent bias audits and candidate notice for automated employment decision tools — and consistent application of a rubric is not the same as freedom from bias. Ravisankar's own framing sets the boundary carefully: Chakra scores candidates, but the final hiring decision stays with humans. The uncomfortable possibility he's really betting on is bigger than either question — that the resume-and-riddle interview format everyone loves to hate was measuring the wrong thing all along.