Karat blog

Not long ago, hiring software engineers was largely about evaluating whether someone could write quality code on their own. Today, that assumption no longer reflects how engineering work actually gets done. Generative AI has become part of the modern software development workflow. Engineers use AI to accelerate implementation, explore unfamiliar codebases, generate tests, debug issues, […]

Financial services engineering leaders are tasked with modernizing legacy systems, shipping new digital products, and navigating an AI revolution – all while competing with big tech and fast-growing startups for increasingly scarce engineering talent. To better understand where FinServ engineering leaders are feeling the most pressure, Karat analyzed data from 303 CTOs, CIOs, VPs of […]

Money20/20 Europe Recap (2026): Can you assess how engineers use AI credits? Agentic excitement, governance and more.

[This article was originally published in 2020, but has been updated to reflect the evolution of interviewing and what Karat technical interviews measure in the human + AI era.] Going back to the early days of Karat, reviewing candidate feedback has been one of the most important ways we gauge the consistency, accuracy, and fairness […]

What building and running the first human-led, AI-enabled technical interview system actually looks like When we launched Karat NextGen late last year, we had a clear thesis: the way companies evaluate engineering talent hadn’t kept pace with how software is actually built. AI tools had changed the job, but interviews were still designed for a […]

A Practical Guide for Training Interviewers in the Human + AI Era AI use in technical interviews can be detected by observing candidate behavior, coding patterns, and reasoning during live interviews. Common signals include continuous screen switching, instant fully formed solutions, inconsistent explanations, and pasted code blocks.The most reliable approach is training interviewers to evaluate […]

AI has raised the stakes on every engineering hire. Most evaluation processes weren’t built for that. Here’s how the best engineering organizations are closing the gap. For most of the last decade, growing engineering capacity meant growing headcount. You hired aggressively, accepted some variance in quality, and assumed that volume and velocity would carry teams […]

AI-driven legacy modernization is quickly becoming a priority for financial services CIOs, but contractor governance frameworks have not kept pace. This week, two announcements signaled a structural shift for financial services technology leaders. Anthropic released a COBOL modernization playbook to accelerate mainframe transformation. At the same time, OpenAI unveiled its Frontier Alliances program with global […]

AI is changing technical hiring by accelerating every stage of the funnel and making it harder to identify genuine software engineering skills from AI-assisted output. Candidates can now easily produce polished resumes and correct interview answers, even if they lack the necessary skills or knowledge. This degrades hiring signals and is forcing companies to rethink […]