Why Coderbase
Know who can actually do the job
Most screening tells you who interviews well, not who can actually do it. Coderbase runs technical and non-technical interviews that answer that with evidence.
The problem
Hiring is expensive to get wrong, and hard to get right
It's one of the most consequential decisions your team makes, and most of it still comes down to a resume, a conversation, and a gut feel. Four things make it hard:
A hire means months of salary and roadmap, committed after a few hours of contact. When it's wrong, you usually find out months later, once it's expensive to undo.
A strong resume, a smooth conversation, a passing test score – none of them prove someone can do the work, and AI has made the old shortcuts trivial to fake.
Telling real skill from a rehearsed answer takes an expert, and your experts are expensive, busy, or – for plenty of roles – not on your team at all.
Unstructured interviews swing with whoever ran them, and when someone asks why a candidate passed or failed, there's no record to point to.
The alternatives
The ways teams handle it today
Each one is a fair choice with a real cost.
Your engineers, doing the filtering
Your engineers know the bar best, and the final call should stay theirs. But early screens burn their time on candidates who were never going to pass, and when the roadmap is busy, structure is the first thing to slip – so the verdict ends up depending on who ran the room.
Code puzzles don't predict real work
Automated assessment platforms typically use code puzzles that aren't representative of real work. They're also trivially defeated with AI – one of the most common complaints is candidates with 100% Codility scores, for example, who can't code their way out of a paper bag.
Candidates hate it – and it doesn't work
An AI interviewer is cheap and always available, but interviews run both ways: good candidates are judging you while you judge them, and being grilled by a bot reads as disrespect. Many walk out, and the ones who stay aren't measured well – today's AI interviewers can't probe, can't adapt, and can't tell a rehearsed answer from real understanding. Coderbase uses AI to organize notes, suggest drafts and flag evidence. An experienced interviewer runs the session, makes every judgment and signs the report.
Humans at scale, hired at the lowest price
The closest model to ours: calendars protected, humans in the room. The catch is who's in the room – most services race to the bottom for the cheapest talent they can find. We do the opposite: our interviewers are experienced engineers who are also experienced interviewers, many with tier-1 experience and over ten years of complex work, and we pay fairly, far above the market, so they stay.
The most expensive way to save money
Skipping proper interviews saves money upfront, but it's the most expensive mistake you can make. A mis-hire surfaces in weeks, costs months of salary plus a restarted search, and takes the roadmap down with it. An interview costs less than the day of senior engineering time it replaces.
What we do about it
How Coderbase fixes this
Our interviewers, all senior engineers, run your early rounds, and your engineers only meet the candidates who passed – each one with a report your whole team can check: the score, the checklist, the final code, and the playback behind it. The rubric travels into your own rounds too, and your interviewers can run theirs on the platform whenever you're ready. You wouldn't build your own payroll software; there's no more reason to build your own interviewing stack.
Score, observation checklist, final code, and the keystroke replay. Forward it to the CTO, attach it to the submission, or defend it in the hiring committee – the evidence is attached.
Candidates are scored fairly, no matter who interviews them. Same questions, same rubric, same math, placed on the cohort curve – the outcome is based on their code, not the interviewer's mood.
The interviewer you get in March is the same one you got in January. We're very selective, we pay interviewers well enough that they stay, and every plan is priced to cover the interviews in it. We're bootstrapped: nothing here runs on a subsidy that expires.
The research
Built on established science
Eighty-five years of research on how to pick people for jobs point at the same two winners: work-sample tasks and structured interviews are the strongest predictors of job performance on record (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998 meta-analysis). A Coderbase session is exactly those two things stacked: real work, scored on a fixed rubric, by a senior engineer who interviews far more often than anyone on your team. And because observation anxiety is real, we design it out – a prep brief before the session, a supportive interviewer in it, an optional no-penalty redo after it.
Run one interview.Read the report and decide from there.
Start with 2 interviews run by your own team. No card required.