Lately there's been a lot of opposition around Leetcode/Hackerrank style quizzes for screening candidates because it doesnt evaluate a candidate on what's important for a SWE today.
Parallely cost and capabilities of LLM inferences have become really good and voice is more human-like than ever. So a new interface for assessing candidates that resembles a live coding interview being done by a helpful yet objective multimodal AI should theoretically be a great alternative.
I would love to hear from fellow Technical Recruiters and Engineers alike on what you think about this format?"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai","interviewer"],"value":"Technical AI interviewers \u2013 yay or nay?"}},"_tags":["story","author_atShourya","story_41847203","ask_hn"],"author":"atShourya","children":[41847419,41847427,41847456,41847472,41847480,41847624,41847733,41847928,41849006],"created_at":"2024-10-15T10:51:42Z","created_at_i":1728989502,"num_comments":9,"objectID":"41847203","points":5,"story_id":41847203,"story_text":"Hi chat, wanted to get your opinion on voice AI that can conduct technical interviewers:
Lately there's been a lot of opposition around Leetcode/Hackerrank style quizzes for screening candidates because it doesnt evaluate a candidate on what's important for a SWE today.
Parallely cost and capabilities of LLM inferences have become really good and voice is more human-like than ever. So a new interface for assessing candidates that resembles a live coding interview being done by a helpful yet objective multimodal AI should theoretically be a great alternative.
I would love to hear from fellow Technical Recruiters and Engineers alike on what you think about this format?","title":"Technical AI interviewers \u2013 yay or nay?","updated_at":"2025-10-06T20:28:28Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"sp2hari"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["hackerrank","ai","interviewer"],"value":"HackerRank CTO & author of this repo here
There's no better feeling than building something open source and watching it take off. Nine months ago, I built a simple hiring agent to solve one very real problem.
Things it is not: It's not an ATS. We don't use it to screen our open roles. Our customers don't use it either.
Here's what it is: Every year at HackerRank, we get 50,000 to 60,000 intern applications. No human can read that many resumes well. So I built something to rank them, helping me decide which resumes to read first.
[This was before we built AI Interviewer (Chakra) to automate the first round of interviews, so candidates are no longer rejected based on their resumes alone.]
Two things worth clarifying since I've seen them come up in this thread:
The default model is gemma3:4b because it's what runs locally on most laptops - no cloud API needed. Actual resumes are evaluated using a top Gemini model. The repo ships with a demo config, not the production one.
The cutoff score was set very low \u2014 the system was designed to rank resumes, not reject them. Only resumes at the very bottom of the distribution were filtered out. The vast majority passed through to human review, where the real decisions were made.
Over the last week, it's taken on a life of its own. People are cloning it, running their own resumes through it, opening issues, sending PRs.
I contributed to open source a lot in college. Somewhere along the way, I drifted away from it. This week reminded me how good that feeling is. This thread has also given me more ideas than I expected. The critiques here are sharp and I'm already thinking about how to act on them. Improvements are coming."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["hackerrank"],"value":"HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No \u2013 88"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["hackerrank"],"value":"https://danunparsed.com/p/hackerrank-open-source-ats"}},"_tags":["comment","author_sp2hari","story_48713832"],"author":"sp2hari","children":[48718105,48718123,48718150,48718246,48718422,48721586],"comment_text":"HackerRank CTO & author of this repo here
There's no better feeling than building something open source and watching it take off. Nine months ago, I built a simple hiring agent to solve one very real problem.
Things it is not: It's not an ATS. We don't use it to screen our open roles. Our customers don't use it either.
Here's what it is: Every year at HackerRank, we get 50,000 to 60,000 intern applications. No human can read that many resumes well. So I built something to rank them, helping me decide which resumes to read first.
[This was before we built AI Interviewer (Chakra) to automate the first round of interviews, so candidates are no longer rejected based on their resumes alone.]
Two things worth clarifying since I've seen them come up in this thread:
The default model is gemma3:4b because it's what runs locally on most laptops - no cloud API needed. Actual resumes are evaluated using a top Gemini model. The repo ships with a demo config, not the production one.
The cutoff score was set very low \u2014 the system was designed to rank resumes, not reject them. Only resumes at the very bottom of the distribution were filtered out. The vast majority passed through to human review, where the real decisions were made.
Over the last week, it's taken on a life of its own. People are cloning it, running their own resumes through it, opening issues, sending PRs.
I contributed to open source a lot in college. Somewhere along the way, I drifted away from it. This week reminded me how good that feeling is. This thread has also given me more ideas than I expected. The critiques here are sharp and I'm already thinking about how to act on them. Improvements are coming.","created_at":"2026-06-29T11:56:12Z","created_at_i":1782734172,"objectID":"48718084","parent_id":48713832,"story_id":48713832,"story_title":"HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No \u2013 88","story_url":"https://danunparsed.com/p/hackerrank-open-source-ats","updated_at":"2026-07-01T17:41:31Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"rvz"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["hackerrank","ai","interviewer"],"value":"Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application:
A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.
As I said before at least 2 of the following:
1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.
2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.
3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.
The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.
It is that simple."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_rvz","story_47435782"],"author":"rvz","children":[47436143,47436730,47437106,47442148,47442986],"comment_text":"Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application:
A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.
As I said before at least 2 of the following:
1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.
2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.
3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.
The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.
It is that simple.","created_at":"2026-03-19T07:23:14Z","created_at_i":1773904994,"objectID":"47435984","parent_id":47435782,"story_id":47435782,"story_title":"Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?","updated_at":"2026-03-24T10:05:24Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"nitramm"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["hackerrank","ai","interviewer"],"value":"I saw the HackerRank (YC S11) hiring post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47667011) and it made me realize I no longer understand how to evaluate candidates effectively.
Specifically, we are changing hiring across 3 dimensions:\n> Tasks: Real-world tasks on code repositories vs standard algorithmic-style puzzles\n> Evaluation: AI fluency, orchestration skills vs functional correctness\n> Candidate experience: Agentic IDE vs a simple code editor
In the \u201cold world,\u201d you could ask multiple questions and triangulate skill from answers. Now it seems like evaluation depends heavily on tools and models that keep changing month to month.
So I\u2019m curious:\n> What signals actually correlate with strong engineers today?\n> How do you design interviews that don\u2019t become obsolete with the next model release?\n> Are algorithmic interviews still useful at all?
Would love to hear from people who have recently changed their hiring process or have been interviewed using this new approach."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["ai"],"value":"Ask HN: Hiring in the age of AI-assisted coding: what works?"}},"_tags":["story","author_nitramm","story_47722081","ask_hn"],"author":"nitramm","children":[47722210,47722889,47723160,47723526,47724105,47726239,47726555,47726557,47727218,47727822,47733722,47733969,47735381,47736969,47745194,47771837,47887824],"created_at":"2026-04-10T18:47:49Z","created_at_i":1775846869,"num_comments":19,"objectID":"47722081","points":29,"story_id":47722081,"story_text":"I saw the HackerRank (YC S11) hiring post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47667011) and it made me realize I no longer understand how to evaluate candidates effectively.
Specifically, we are changing hiring across 3 dimensions:\n> Tasks: Real-world tasks on code repositories vs standard algorithmic-style puzzles\n> Evaluation: AI fluency, orchestration skills vs functional correctness\n> Candidate experience: Agentic IDE vs a simple code editor
In the \u201cold world,\u201d you could ask multiple questions and triangulate skill from answers. Now it seems like evaluation depends heavily on tools and models that keep changing month to month.
So I\u2019m curious:\n> What signals actually correlate with strong engineers today?\n> How do you design interviews that don\u2019t become obsolete with the next model release?\n> Are algorithmic interviews still useful at all?
Would love to hear from people who have recently changed their hiring process or have been interviewed using this new approach.","title":"Ask HN: Hiring in the age of AI-assisted coding: what works?","updated_at":"2026-04-26T08:31:21Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":4,"nbPages":1,"page":0,"params":"query=HackerRank+AI+interviewer&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":32,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":569,"roundTrip":23},"fetch":{"query":28,"scanning":2,"total":31},"total":32},"query":"HackerRank AI interviewer","serverTimeMS":602}