The AI Interviewer Will See You Now. It Wants You to Use AI. | Edition 343
Edition 343 — HackerRank’s AI ran 500,000 job interviews in testing. Here’s how it scores you, and how to prepare for one.
The first round of your next job interview may not have a human in it.
This week HackerRank, the coding-test company used by more than 3,000 employers including Amazon and Nvidia, opened its AI interviewer, Chakra, to all of its customers. It already ran more than 500,000 interviews during a six-month test with companies like Snowflake and Capgemini, TechCrunch reports.
And it isn’t just tech. In a Greenhouse survey of nearly 3,000 job seekers in five countries this spring, 63% said they had already faced an AI interview, up 13 points in six months.
What the AI interview actually is
Chakra rolls three steps of a typical tech hiring process into one sitting: the recruiter screen, the take-home test, and the interview with an engineer. The candidate works on a realistic task in a real codebase, and the AI asks follow-up questions about how they are approaching it and why.
The twist is that you are allowed, even expected, to use AI while you do it. Chakra scores what HackerRank calls “AI fluency”: how well you describe a problem to an AI assistant, judge what it gives back, and steer it to a good answer. HackerRank’s co-founder and CEO, Vivek Ravisankar, put the reasoning simply: “Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact.” A finished answer no longer proves much. How you got there does.
One side effect surprised even the company. With AI allowed in the open, HackerRank says flags for suspicious activity dropped 70 to 80% compared with its traditional tests. When the tool is permitted, people stop sneaking it.
What candidates are saying
Not great things, yet. In the Greenhouse survey, 70% said they were not clearly told up front that an AI would evaluate them, and 21% only found out when the interview started. 38% had walked away from a hiring process because it included an AI interview. Only 21% believe employers use AI responsibly.
What candidates want is simple: tell them in advance (44%), explain what the AI measures (39%), and offer the option of a human interviewer (46%). And after an AI interview, more than half heard nothing back at all.
HackerRank says a person still makes the final hiring decision; the AI handles the structured part and hands humans a report. Rules are catching up too. New York City already requires a yearly bias audit for automated hiring tools.
What it means for you
Ask up front. If you get an interview invite, ask whether an AI will run or score it, and what it measures. You are entitled to know.
Think out loud. These tools score your reasoning, not just your answer. Say what you are doing and why, the same way you would with a good human interviewer.
Practice working with AI, not hiding it. If AI is allowed, use it well: give it clear instructions, question what it returns, and fix what it gets wrong.
If you’re the one hiring, tell candidates. Disclosure is the single thing candidates ask for most, and it costs nothing.
For years, the worry was that AI would help people cheat their way through interviews. Now the interview assumes you will use AI and grades how well you do it. That is probably where a lot of jobs are headed too, which makes this one of the more honest interview formats yet. The part still missing is telling people it is happening.