Karatvs
SeekOut
SeekOut: For sourcing and building candidate pipelines rather than outsourcing the interview itself
Karat
Outsourced technical interviewing, engineers conduct your candidate interviews for you
As of 1 September 2026, Karat's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. A service that supplies professional, trained interviewers to run live technical interviews on a company's behalf, scored against that company's own rubric. Softwr lists it under Recruitment. Karat is available on Web.
Overview
What Karat does
Karat provides Interview Engineers, a bench of trained technical interviewers, who conduct structured coding and system design interviews for client companies using the client's own interview questions and scoring rubric. The candidate experiences a live interview exactly as before, but the person on the other side of the call is a Karat contractor rather than the hiring company's own engineer. Karat also runs CodeSignal-style automated first-round screens under its own brand for high-volume roles. The commercial logic is that engineering time spent interviewing is expensive and inconsistent: a company's own engineers give up hours of billable work, show up unprepared, or apply inconsistent bars, and Karat sells consistency and capacity instead. That only works if a company is willing to hand a candidate-facing moment, arguably the most human part of hiring, to a third party, which is a harder sell for senior or culture-fit-heavy rounds than for early-stage technical screens. Buyers are mid-size to large engineering organisations hiring software engineers at volume, particularly ones scaling fast or running seasonal hiring pushes, where the alternative is either delaying pipelines or burning senior engineer hours. Pricing is not published; it is quoted per interview or per contracted volume, so a buyer cannot compare cost against an internal hire without asking sales first.
What people use it for
- A company scaling engineering headcount quickly and unable to free up enough internal engineer time for first-round technical interviews
- A hiring team wanting a consistent bar across interviewers when growth has diluted interview quality
- A seasonal hiring push, such as a new-grad or intern cohort, that needs a large volume of structured interviews in a short window
- A company that has measured interviewer no-shows or inconsistent scoring as a source of candidate drop-off
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Karat.
- Pricing is quote-only, so a buyer cannot model cost per hire against internal interviewer time without a sales conversation
- Handing the interview itself to a contractor removes the one part of the process where candidates meet a real employee, which can weaken employer brand for roles where culture fit matters most
- It solves interviewer capacity for technical screens but does not replace hiring manager or team-fit rounds, so it only removes part of the funnel
- Quality depends on how well the client-provided rubric and questions are written; a poor rubric produces poor Karat interviews just as it would internally
- Contracted interview volume can create pressure to keep using the service even after an internal hiring slowdown, since commitments are typically annual
- Candidates sometimes react negatively on discovering the interviewer is not an employee of the company they applied to, which is a reputational risk not visible until candidates start talking about it publicly
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Karat
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- KaratvsGem
Gem: For a recruiting CRM that manages sourcing and outreach rather than interview delivery
Pricing
What Karat costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Karat
On request
- Interview Engineer coverage
- Structured technical interviews
- Interview analytics and calibration
Capabilities
Features
Interview Engineers
Trained third-party interviewers run live technical interviews using the client's own questions and rubric
Structured scoring
Standardised rubrics and calibration intended to reduce interviewer-to-interviewer variance
High-volume screening
Automated and human first-round screens for roles with large applicant numbers
Interview intelligence
Analytics on pass rates, time-to-hire and interviewer consistency across a hiring funnel
Scheduling integration
Coordinates interview slots against candidate and engineer availability
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Do candidates know they are being interviewed by a contractor rather than an employee?
Karat discloses that Interview Engineers are trained third-party interviewers rather than employees of the hiring company, though disclosure practices are set by the client.
Can Karat interview for languages or stacks outside mainstream web and backend engineering?
Coverage depends on the pool of Interview Engineers Karat maintains for a given stack; niche or highly specialised roles may have less coverage than common web and backend roles.
Is pricing per interview or per contracted block of volume?
Karat does not publish pricing; it is quoted per client based on expected interview volume and contract term.
Keep looking
Where to go from Karat
- Karat alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Karat pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Karat badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Recruitment softwareThe full category
- Best Recruitment softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Recruitment software for
Compare Karat with
- SeekOut
- Gem
- Codility
- HackerRank
- Findem
- hireEZ
- Fetcher
- Glassdoor
- Indeed
- Checkr
- JobScore
- Teamtailor
- Pilot
- SAP SuccessFactors
- BrightHire
- Bullhorn
- Comeet
- Checkr
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Karat, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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