HackerRank launches AI agent to conduct job interviews

HackerRank has made Chakra, its AI interviewing agent, generally available after six months in beta and over 500,000 test interviews. Chakra gives candidates a real-world coding task and an AI assistant, then asks follow-up questions about their reasoning and approach. It combines recruiter screen, take-home assessment, and engineer interview into one session. HackerRank says suspicious-activity flags dropped 70-80% compared to traditional assessments. Chakra scores candidates but leaves final hiring decisions to humans, with CEO Vivek Ravisankar arguing a properly tuned AI applies evaluation criteria more consistently than human interviewers.