The technical layer of the interview, rebuilt for the AI era
The technical interview is broken. Coding tests have collapsed into a cheating arms race, and the capability that actually matters — engineering effectiveness in an AI-augmented workflow — is not measured anywhere. Basanite is the technical layer rebuilt for the AI era.
VCBasanite replaces 17 interview hours per hire with one signal-dense session that measures what coding tests can’t: how candidates actually think with AI. Every hire comes with a defensible, evidence-backed report, and a process you can scale up, scale down, or reshape around any role.
For a team hiring 40 engineers a year, that’s £400k+ recovered annually.
The impact
of senior engineering time saved per hire.
Replaces the screening + first technical round.
cut from time-to-hire.
From 10 weeks to 6, on average.
in mishire risk avoided, per hire.
46% of new hires fail in 18 months. 89% of those failures are signals coding tests don't measure.
behind every hiring decision.
Eight dimensions, scored on the same rubric, every time. Defensible to your board, your team, and the candidate.
ROI calculator
→ You’re spending roughly £612,000 on hiring inefficiency every year.
→ Basanite recovers ~£408,000 of that.
Math: Ashby 2026, Leadership IQ, SHRM 2025. See the assumptions →
The four levers
Time — One 30-minute session replaces resume screening, phone screen, and first technical interview. Recruiter and engineer hours collapse by 60–70%.
Speed — Candidates flow through in days, not weeks. You stop losing offers to faster-moving competitors. Every vacancy day costs £500–1,000 in lost output.
Quality — 46% of new hires fail within 18 months (Leadership IQ, n=20,000). 89% of those failures come from attitude, coachability, and judgment — exactly what Basanite measures, and exactly what coding tests miss.
Defensibility — Every candidate gets scored against the same eight-dimension rubric, with the evidence behind each score traceable to the actual interview. One report your hiring manager, your board, and the candidate can all read.
And it bends to your role, not the other way around. Custom dimensions, custom rubrics, custom workbench tasks — for engineering, data, ML, security, or wherever you take it next.
The dimensions
Coding tests assume the candidate works alone. That world is gone. 76% of technical candidates now use AI mid-interview. The question that predicts on-the-job performance has shifted from “can they code without it?” to “how well do they think with it?”
Eight dimensions. One rubric. Defensible scoring.
| Problem framing | Can they turn a vague brief into a workable spec? |
|---|---|
| Context handling | Do they give the model what it needs — or hope for the best? |
| Verification | Do they check the model’s output, or ship it? |
| Iteration | When the first answer is wrong, what do they do next? |
| Tool fluency | Do they know which tool fits which subtask? |
| Judgment under uncertainty | When the model is confidently wrong, do they catch it? |
| Coachability | Can they take feedback mid-task and adjust? |
| Communication | Can they explain what they did and why? |
Watch the demo
The process
A two-round assessment: a conversational round that reveals what a candidate thinks, and an AI Collaboration Workbench round that reveals what they actually do.
Most hiring tools measure how well someone can approximate a good candidate.
Basanite measures whether they actually are one.
Design philosophy
The central conviction behind every design decision at Basanite: most hiring tools are optimised for the wrong signal. They measure how well someone can approximate the idea of a good candidate, rather than whether they actually are one.
Each layer of the assessment exists to move one level deeper into signal quality. A candidate who answers fluently at the surface should encounter ground that shifts beneath them at the next layer. The edges of real ability are blurry. Performed ability has no edges.
By anchoring every evaluation to consistent frameworks and explicit scoring criteria, a self taught engineer without institutional pedigree can be seen as clearly as one from a target university. Both are asked the same questions, in the same spirit, with the same depth of follow up.
Basanite flags where human expertise is required, produces quotable evidence rather than opaque scores, and positions itself as infrastructure that makes human judgment better, not the mechanism that replaces it.
The best hiring processes leave candidates with a clearer understanding of themselves. Every assessment strategy deployed by Basanite can be honestly explained to the candidate it is applied to.
For hiring teams
For candidates
The team
Engineers and AI researchers from Manchester, building the hiring tool we wish existed.
CEO
CPO
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