1,200+ Assessments and 100+ Custom Questions: How Solent built Technical Hiring Around CoderPad

Solent uses CoderPad Screen across all software engineering hiring to create a consistent technical bar, build assessments around the skills that matter, and qualify candidates before engineers spend time interviewing.

When Technical Talent is Your Product, Signal Matters

Solent is a French engineering consultancy and part of Smart4 Engineering, a group of specialist engineering and technology companies that also uses CoderPad across multiple entities.

Solent recruits technical talent for complex client projects, making the quality and relevance of the people it hires core to what it delivers to customers.

That makes technical qualification critical. Today, every software engineer Solent hires goes through CoderPad Screen, giving the team a consistent way to validate technical skills before investing engineering time in an interview.

Our competitive edge versus other staffing firms isn’t our prices or our availability. It’s the relevance of the profiles we send over.

Philippe Founder, Solent

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CoderPad helps Solent protect that edge. Engineers walk into interviews with technical signal already in hand — and can spend their time going deeper instead of establishing baseline credibility.

100+ Custom Questions and One Platform Flexible Enough to Make Them Work

Solent doesn't hire for one standard software engineer profile. Different roles, technologies and levels of experience demand different skills — so the team needs assessments that can adapt with them.

With CoderPad Screen, the team has built 100+ custom questions tailored to its own technical requirements.

For Solent, that means deciding exactly what matters for a role — from language-specific knowledge to algorithms and problem solving — and building the assessment around it.

The test saves us time, but it also opens up the discussion in the interview.

Sybille TA Leader, Solent

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That signal carries into the next stage. Engineers can see where a candidate was strong, where they struggled and what to dig into — turning the assessment into both a screening tool and a starting point for a better technical interview.

Now, Solent is looking at how CoderPad's AI Question Creator could make that customization even easier — generating new role-specific questions around the skills the team wants to assess without relying on engineering to build every custom question from scratch.

Using Benchmark AI to Speed Up Time to Hire 

Solent’s next opportunity isn’t just creating assessments faster. It’s shortening the time between a candidate completing an assessment and recruiting knowing what to do next.

Today, completed assessments still require manual review, often involving an engineer before recruiting can move a candidate forward. That handoff can slow the process and pull technical teams into work before an interview even begins.

Solent has started testing CoderPad Screen’s Benchmark AI alongside its existing manual reviews to see whether recruiters can get the technical signal they need without always waiting for an engineer to weigh in.

The potential impact is significant: reducing a review step that can currently add two to three days to the hiring process.

Benchmark AI applies consistent evaluation criteria to candidate performance and helps surface the information hiring teams need to make faster, more informed decisions.

For Solent, it’s the next step in a hiring process it has already built around CoderPad: define the technical bar for each role, assess every software engineer against it, and give hiring teams the information they need to move the right candidates forward.

After 1,200+ assessments, CoderPad has become a core part of how Solent qualifies technical talent. Now, AI gives the team an opportunity to make that process faster — while preserving the technical rigor that differentiates Solent in the first place.