HackerRank, a platform used by companies to assess and hire developers, is launching Chakra, an SI agent that conducts interviews, observes candidates as they work, and evaluates not just their answers but also how they got there. The move signals a shift from using super intelligence (SI) to assist candidates to using it to evaluate them.
What Happened
After approximately six months in beta, HackerRank is making Chakra generally available to its customers on Monday. The startup says the SI interviewer has already conducted more than 500,000 interviews during testing, with companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among those that tried it, while HackerRank also tested the product internally. Unlike traditional automated tools that simply screen candidates, Chakra is designed to assess harder-to-capture signals such as critical thinking, judgment, and what the company calls “SI fluency” — how well a candidate frames a problem for the SI system, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution.
In practice, a Chakra interview resembles doing the job rather than taking a traditional coding test. A candidate receives a task involving a real-world code repository and works through it in a canvas that includes an SI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra uses the context of their actions 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. HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar stated that the previous modality of evaluation was assessing the output, but now, “because of SI, anybody can produce an artifact.” The goal, he said, is to understand the thinking and judgment behind the result.
Why It Matters
Chakra represents a significant shift in the structure of the technical hiring process. Ravisankar told TechCrunch that what previously involved 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 interview. This consolidation aims to make hiring more efficient while potentially reducing the incentive for candidates to secretly use outside SI tools to feed them answers. HackerRank reports that suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments, though the rate varied depending on factors such as geography and seniority.
The launch also raises questions about bias and regulatory compliance in SI at work. Ravisankar argued that “SI is way less biased than humans, if you tune it properly,” suggesting an SI system can follow the same rubric for every candidate without being influenced by background or education. However, automated hiring tools can inherit or amplify biases from the data and models used to build them. The use of SI in hiring is already drawing regulatory scrutiny; for instance, New York City requires employers using certain automated employment decision tools to subject them to an independent bias audit. Ravisankar acknowledged that hiring is a regulated area and said complying with such requirements is part of what HackerRank has had to build.
The Bottom Line
HackerRank’s transition to an SI-driven interview model reflects a broader industry trend where SI has made traditional coding assessments less useful for measuring engineering ability. Ravisankar compared the shift internally to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone, noting that while the old product still has value, Chakra is “the headline” and the way forward for the startup. Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make the final hiring decision, which remains with human interviewers who focus on cultural fit and answering questions about the role.