The Karat interview process

The detail that surprises most candidates is that the person on the call does not work at the company. Karat provides interviewing as a service: hiring companies outsource an early technical round, and a Karat Interview Engineer runs it against a question set agreed with that company.

That changes what the conversation can be. The interviewer is a working engineer and will assess your code seriously, but they cannot tell you about the team's roadmap, who you would report to, or why the role is open. Save those questions for the company's own rounds and use the time here on the technical work.

It also changes the consistency. Because the same engineer runs the same interview many times, your performance is compared against a large set of other candidates on identical questions rather than against one hiring manager's mood.

You want to know the running order before you sit down, so here it is. The session is scheduled as a single block and follows a standard structure, with the technical work taking most of it.

• A short introduction. The interviewer explains the format, the recording, and how the time is split.
• Technical questions. Focused questions on fundamentals relevant to the role, answered out loud rather than written.
• A coding exercise. Work in a shared editor while explaining what you are doing. Communication is part of what gets written up.
• Your questions. Process questions work here; company questions do not, for the reason above.

The session is recorded. Karat sends the hiring company a structured summary alongside the recording, which means a decision can be reviewed by someone who was not present.

Because the report is structured, it captures things an informal interview might not. Whether you asked clarifying questions before coding. Whether you stated your approach before typing. Whether you noticed an edge case yourself or needed a prompt. Whether you recovered when something did not work.

Consider a concrete case. A backend engineer gets a Karat round for a mid-level role, does not finish the coding exercise inside the time, but narrates the approach clearly, identifies the complexity problem in their own solution, and describes what they would change. The write-up reflects reasoning under pressure, and the candidate advances. Silent code that runs is a weaker signal than spoken reasoning that does not quite land.

Practising that narration is unusual preparation, and it transfers. A session on the mock interview page rehearses explaining your thinking out loud, which is the habit that solitary problem-solving never builds.

Being straight about this matters more than a sales line. A Karat interview is recorded. That puts it in the same category as any recorded or proctored round, which we treat as out of scope for live assistance rather than pretending an overlay goes unnoticed on a session someone can replay.

What SubcueAI does support is the live, unrecorded conversation: the native macOS and Windows app captures system audio and your microphone and shows suggestions in a floating local overlay, and the browser extension's Side Panel does the same for calls running in a Chromium tab, capturing the meeting tab's audio only. No meeting bot joins, and nothing is injected into the meeting page. Screen sharing, recorded rounds, proctored assessments, and company-managed devices stay outside that.

For a Karat round specifically, preparation is the honest lever. The rest of the interview formats are mapped on the interview types hub.