Customer story · PayPlan
25 hires. 60 interviews. Zero engineering hours.
PayPlan, one of the UK's largest free debt-advice providers, rebuilt its engineering team in 2026. Coderbase ran the entire technical interview stage while their engineers kept shipping.
Figures from PayPlan's hiring push, February to July 2026.
The setup
A hiring project too big for the team to interview for
PayPlan's platform runs on Java services with React on the web and React Native in candidates' pockets. In early 2026 the company set out to grow the team across that whole stack: full-stack engineers junior and senior, React Native specialists, platform and data engineers, a quality lead, an engineering manager.
Their recruitment agency, Client Server, kept the candidate pipeline full. That left the bottleneck every scaling team hits: somebody senior has to sit in every technical interview, and every one of those hours comes off the roadmap.
From 20 February to July, Coderbase was that somebody. Sixty interviews across nine role profiles, and PayPlan's engineers attended none of them.
How it ran
Send a link, read a report
A format per role
Nine interview formats, one per role profile: repair-and-extend coding in the stack the job actually uses, plus system design and leadership questions where the role called for them. Same format, same rubric, same scoring math for every candidate on a role.
Candidates self-scheduled
PayPlan's recruitment agency sourced candidates; each one got a link, picked a slot, and received a prep brief. Nobody at PayPlan chased calendars.
A senior engineer ran every interview
Live sessions in the browser IDE, scored criterion by criterion as they happened. Handholding recorded and priced into the score, integrity flags noted in the moment.
Reports landed the same day
Composite rating with the math underneath, per-question notes, the candidate's code, and full keystroke playback. Borderline calls were settled by replaying the session, not by scheduling another round.
The numbers
Just over £6,000, all-in
Run in-house, a technical interview costs a senior engineer about three hours once you count preparation, the session itself, the write-up, and the debrief. Sixty of them is roughly 180 engineering hours: more than a month of a senior engineer's year, spent not building.
At a loaded London senior-engineer rate of about £70 an hour, that's £13,000 of engineering time before you price the stalled roadmap. PayPlan paid just over £6,000, and the engineering hours simply came back. The hiring managers' side of each decision became a ten-minute report read.
"Your interviews and reports are excellent and really helping with the hiring project. Thank you."
Tim Richardson · CTO, PayPlan
The first PayPlan interview ran on 20 February. Five months and 25 hires later, they were still booking them.
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