Every Shortlist Comes With An SRUK Fit Score
Six weighted dimensions. One headline percentage. An SRUK CV designed to be read in thirty seconds — and an honest assessment of every candidate against your brief.
Six weighted dimensions. One headline percentage. An SRUK CV designed to be read in thirty seconds — and an honest assessment of every candidate against your brief.
Most agencies send their clients CVs. Sales Recruit UK sends an assessment. Every candidate on a Sales Recruit UK shortlist arrives in the SRUK CV — a single document that pairs the candidate’s full work history, presented in our standard format, with the SRUK Fit Score: a brief-specific assessment scored honestly against the things that actually matter for your role. The score is built from six weighted dimensions drawn directly from the conversation we have with you at the start of the search, and the consultant’s commentary makes the score legible — strengths and gaps both, named openly. A four-candidate shortlist becomes a thirty-minute review rather than an afternoon. With three offices in Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham and forty years of specialist sales recruitment experience across nine industry sectors, we run searches the way a serious hire deserves to be run. To see the process in action, see our client case studies.
The SRUK Fit Score is a brief-specific assessment of every candidate we shortlist. Six dimensions are drawn from the conversation we have with you at the start of the search — the things you’ve told us are non-negotiable, weighted against the things that are merely desirable, framed against the realities of your sector and your team. Each dimension is scored out of twenty, and the headline percentage is the candidate’s overall fit against the brief.
The dimensions change with every brief. A specification sales role into the construction merchant channel is scored differently to a national account manager hire in FMCG, and an SDR appointment for a scale-up Tech business is scored differently again. What stays the same is the discipline. Every candidate you see, on every shortlist, is scored the same way against the same brief — so the differences you’re weighing up are differences in the candidates, not differences in how their CVs were written or which consultant happened to write the longer summary.
When the score is strong, the commentary tells you why. When there’s a gap on one dimension, the commentary names it openly and tells you whether it’s worth probing at interview or whether the candidate is still the right hire despite it. Honesty in the document protects honesty in the conversation that follows.
A shortlist of four candidates from four different agencies is a shortlist of four different CV formats. Each one is written to flatter the candidate, none of them are written to help you compare them. Anyone who has screened a stack of CVs knows how much of the job is decoding layout differences before you can even start judging fit.
Every candidate we present arrives in the SRUK CV. Their work history, qualifications and personal profile are preserved in full — content nothing is lost — but the format is normalised to a single layout used for every candidate on every shortlist. The SRUK Fit Score and the consultant’s commentary sit at the top of the document. The structured CV sits behind it. Same sections, same hierarchy, same level of detail, every time.
The result is a shortlist that compares like-for-like in a single sitting, rather than a stack of documents you have to translate into a common shape before you can read them properly.
See a Sample CVThe first conversation isn’t about the role — it’s about the opportunity. We sit down with the decision-makers in your business to understand what makes the role attractive to a strong candidate, what the realistic challenges are, and what would give a good candidate pause. We map non-negotiable skills against desirable ones and we work out the genuine reasons a candidate would say yes to this opportunity over the others they’re considering.
That conversation does two jobs. It gives us the talent map — where the right candidates are, what the realistic shape of the market looks like, what salary the role will need to land at to attract the profile you’ve described. And it gives us the hooks — the genuine selling points of the opportunity that we’ll use in the conversations that follow. The quality of the brief sets the ceiling for the quality of everything that follows it. We invest the time at the start because we’d rather slow down here than restart the search in three months.
A go-to-market plan tailored to where the right candidates actually are. Targeted advertising in the channels that work for your sector — different for an FMCG National Account Manager hire than for an Industrial Sales Engineer or a SaaS BDM. Combined with proactive outreach to the substantial passive candidate network we’ve built across nine industry sectors and forty years of specialist work — the candidates you can’t easily reach yourself, especially when you can only recruit from inside your own sector.
Where it makes sense, we’ll surface candidates from adjacent sectors whose route-to-market knowledge or technical credibility translates directly to your business. A salesperson from one specification-led sector can often transfer cleanly into another. A BDM from one channel-led B2B sector can often translate to another. Some of the strongest placements we make are candidates the client would never have found themselves because the client could only see inside their own sector.
A candidate’s CV tells you what they’ve done. What it doesn’t tell you is whether the role on offer fits the life they want next. We invest the time to understand candidate motivations — what’s driving the decision to consider a change, what they’re looking to move toward, what would make them say no to a strong offer.
Culture and team fit matter as much as the job. People stay in roles where the role, the team and the trajectory match the life they want — and they leave roles where any of those three are wrong, regardless of how good the salary or the title looked at offer stage. The earlier we test for that fit, the fewer surprises arrive later. The depth of the candidate-side conversation is what makes the SRUK Fit Score honest at the assessment stage rather than aspirational.
Once we have a properly qualified shortlist of candidates who genuinely want the role, we re-interview each of them with your specific brief in mind. Every candidate is scored against the six dimensions we agreed at brief stage. The score is built honestly — strengths and gaps both — and presented to you in the SRUK CV alongside the consultant’s commentary on each dimension.
The point of the score is not to pick the winner for you. The point is to make every candidate’s fit against your brief legible at a glance, so the candidates you take to interview are the candidates worth your time, and the questions you ask in the interview room are the questions that actually matter. We do the work of comparing thirty candidates against the brief so that you only need to compare four.
We manage candidates through your interview process and stay close to them between stages. We have honest conversations with candidates throughout the process — about how the role sits against any other opportunities they’re considering, about what they’re weighing up, and about what would change their mind.
Where another role one of our candidates is exploring is genuinely a better fit for what they want next, we’ll say so — and we’ll focus our shortlist on the candidates for whom your role is the strongest match. The result is a shortlist where you know not only whether each candidate fits the role, but where the role fits in their thinking. That context lets you make better-informed offer decisions, including how the offer itself should be positioned to land.
The work between final-stage and signed offer is where placements are won or lost. Counter-offers land. Notice periods get tested. Resignations don’t always go cleanly. Momentum has to be protected through a window where everyone has had time to think and second-guess. A neutral third party manages that window differently to a future employer or a current manager.
We stay close to candidates through offer, resignation, notice and start date. We manage counter-offer conversations as a third party who can give straight advice without the conflict of interest a current manager has and without the awkwardness a future employer has. And we check back in with both sides a few months after start date to surface anything worth resolving early. Most clients underestimate how much of a placement is decided after the offer letter goes out. The work that protects placements through that window is the work that distinguishes a search that lands from one that has to start again.
