The Pulse
HackerRank Says Chakra Has Conducted More Than 500,000 Interviews
HackerRank says its AI interviewer Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews during testing and is now generally available to customers. The company says candidates gave it an average rating above 4.8, while CEO Vivek Ravisankar argues
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
More than 500,000 interviews in beta
HackerRank says its AI interviewer Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews during roughly six months of beta testing, before the company made the product generally available to customers on October 5. Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini were among the companies that tried it, according to TechCrunch’s report. HackerRank’s product page separately says candidates have given Chakra an average rating above 4.8 across more than 500,000 interviews.
The figures put Chakra beyond a limited pilot, but they are company-reported measures. HackerRank does not publish on its product page the number of rating responses behind the 4.8 score or a breakdown by employer, role or candidate group.
Chakra watches the work, not just the answer
Chakra is designed to assess the process a candidate follows, rather than only whether they reach a correct result. A candidate works through a task in a real code repository with an AI assistant available; the system can ask why they chose an approach and how they would respond if a requirement changed. HackerRank says it aims to measure problem-solving, judgment and what it calls AI fluency: how applicants frame tasks for AI, assess its output and guide it toward a useful result.
That format reflects a hiring problem created by widely available code-generation tools: a finished artifact may reveal less about the person who produced it. “The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output,” HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch. “Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact.”
One interview could combine several hiring steps
Ravisankar told TechCrunch that Chakra can combine a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment and an engineer follow-up into a single interview. That is a claim about the product’s potential to change a company’s process, not evidence that every employer using Chakra has replaced those stages. The interview report is intended to inform hiring teams; HackerRank says the hiring decision remains with people.
The format also gives candidates access to AI during the exercise. Ravisankar said suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments, with results varying by geography and seniority. The comparison comes from HackerRank, and the report does not provide the underlying sample sizes or measurement details.
Scoring still needs scrutiny
HackerRank’s product page says Chakra can examine both what candidates say and the work they do, then provide competency scores with supporting evidence from interview transcripts and submitted work. Its candidate help material says the system generates a report for the hiring team and does not make hiring decisions. The company also says the same interview plan and criteria apply to candidates assigned to a given interview, even when follow-up questions differ.
More than half a million sessions show the product has been used at substantial volume, but volume alone does not establish that its assessments are accurate or fair. The unresolved questions are how well Chakra’s scores track job performance across roles and candidate groups, and what evidence employers will use to validate those scores before relying on them.