How Solvay standardized multilingual technical hiring and cultural-fit assessments

About seven in ten open roles at Solvay are Process Engineers, the people who keep a global chemicals operation running safely. For those roles, recruiters needed to evaluate technical skills, cultural fit, and candidates across multiple countries. Yet Solvay had spent a year trialing a screening tool without ever committing to it.

Why the earlier tool never stuck

Three requirements blocked adoption. Solvay hires across dozens of countries, so assessments had to support multiple languages without disadvantaging strong candidates. The company also wanted to evaluate cultural fit consistently alongside technical skills across global teams.

Finally, recruiters worked entirely inside SAP SuccessFactors, so any solution outside their existing workflow created extra steps and low adoption.

No tool met all three requirements at once, leaving hiring slow, subjective, and difficult to standardize.

A setup built to fit how Solvay already hires

Solvay chose Testlify in early 2025 and was live by mid-year. The difference this time was fit, not features:

Cultural-fit assessments. Alongside technical skills, Solvay could evaluate how candidates aligned with its values and ways of working, bringing greater consistency to hiring across global teams.

Multilingual assessments. Candidates completed assessments in their preferred language, helping Solvay maintain one hiring standard without disadvantaging non-native English speakers.

SAP SuccessFactors integration. Assessments became part of recruiters' existing workflow instead of another standalone tool, eliminating manual steps and driving adoption where the previous solution had failed.

One consistent standard for global hiring

For the first time, Solvay evaluated technical skills and cultural fit using one consistent hiring standard across global teams. With 94% of invited candidates enrolling and 81% completing their assessments, recruiters gained comparable insights before interviews while maintaining fairness across multiple languages.

That high completion rate matters at Solvay’s scale. An assessment candidates abandon quickly becomes a hiring bottleneck. Instead, recruiters gained a complete and comparable view of their Process Engineer pipeline.

From screening candidates to measuring capability

The impact soon extended beyond hiring. Building on the same assessment framework, Solvay's Learning team introduced 360-degree reviews to support employee development. What began as a standardized approach to technical and cultural-fit hiring evolved into a consistent framework for measuring capability across the company.