Hire on evidence. Not instinct

A behavioural hiring methodology for growing businesses — built on selection science, not gut feel.

Most hiring decisions are made in the first 4 minutes of an interview.

The remaining hour is your brain building a case for what it already decided. This is not a character flaw — it is how human cognition works under social conditions. The only protection against it is a structured process that forces evidence before judgement.

The research doesn't lie. Your hiring process might.

Unstructured interviews predict just 4% of job performance

— Schmidt & Hunter, 1998

Years of experience predicts job performance at just 3%

— Schmidt & Hunter, 1998

Reference checks predict job performance at just 7%

— Schmidt & Hunter, 1998

Structured interviews are 2× more predictive than unstructured ones

— Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994

WELLPLACED is not your standard recruitment agency.

It is a behavioural placement methodology — we find the right candidates, assess them against a structured evidence framework, and stay engaged through the first 90 days of every placement. That's where most hiring processes stop. It's where ours keeps going.

Built on 85 years of organisational psychology research. Designed for the businesses that standard recruitment leaves behind.

Your brain is working against you in interviews.

One positive quality — confidence, articulacy, warmth — causes you to unconsciously rate everything else higher. The most experienced interviewers are often the most susceptible.
Thorndike 1920
Your fast, automatic brain makes the hiring decision in the first few minutes. The rest of the interview is your slow brain building a case for what the fast brain already decided.
Kahneman 2011
Interviewers consistently rate candidates who are like them more highly — regardless of role fit. Unstructured interviews compound this because you compare candidates to each other, not to the role.
Levashina et al. 2014
Managers with 20 years of interviewing experience are no more accurate at predicting performance than those with 2, without a structured process. Experience without structure compounds bias.
Kruger & Dunning 1999

These are not abstract concepts — they are the reason your last hire might not have worked out.

Built for founders who've hired wrong before — and can't afford to again.

We work with growing businesses, typically five to fifty people, at the point where a hire really matters. Not volume hiring. Not graduate intake. The role that changes things if you get it right — and costs you significantly if you don't.

The roles we place.

Every engagement uses the full WELLPLACED methodology regardless of role type. The factors change. The standard doesn't.

Sales Reps, BDMs, account managers, and sales leads. High emotional regulation and pressure resilience demands. Among the most mis-hired roles in growing businesses.

Business Development Outbound, relationship-driven, pipeline-building roles. Requires a different behavioural profile to inbound sales or account management — and is frequently assessed the same way.

Customer Success Retention-critical and often undervalued until someone leaves. High interpersonal intelligence and emotional regulation requirements. Placed well, a compounding asset. Placed wrong, an invisible drain.

Marketing Coordinators, managers, and heads of marketing for SMEs. Often the first specialist hire into a function with no existing structure — which makes adaptability and logical thinking as important as craft.

Operations Coordinators, managers, and ops leads. High ambiguity tolerance, structured thinking, and pressure resilience. Often the role that holds everything together when placed right — and quietly breaks it when placed wrong.

Project Management Delivery-focused roles requiring structured thinking, adaptability, and strong communication under pressure. Frequently hired on credentials. Almost never assessed behaviourally.

Administration Office managers, executive assistants, and business support roles. Underestimated in their behavioural complexity. The right person in this role protects the time and attention of everyone around them.

Executive Assistant & Chiefs of Staff High-stakes hires that sit closest to the founder. Discretion, emotional intelligence, decisiveness, and communication clarity at 5 out of 5. One wrong placement here is unusually disruptive.

Finance & Accounting Bookkeepers, finance managers, and first finance hires for growing businesses. Placed primarily on technical credentials. The behavioural demands — particularly under pressure and in ambiguous environments — are rarely assessed.

People & HR The first people hire is among the most consequential a founder makes. Frequently done without any structured process at all. The irony is not lost on us.

Customer Service & Support Inbound, client-facing, and support roles requiring sustained emotional regulation and communication clarity. Often high-volume and low-assessment. The retention pattern in this function is entirely predictable — and entirely preventable.

Real Estate — Sales & Property Management Sales agents, property managers, leasing administrators, and compliance coordinators. High interpersonal intelligence, pressure resilience, and communication demands across both functions. Environment fit matters enormously in real estate — the culture of a principal-led agency shapes whether a hire succeeds or fails more than almost any other industry. It is almost never measured.

Construction & Trade — Business Side Project coordinators, contract administrators, estimators, site administrators, and office managers within construction, trades, and building businesses. Technical knowledge gets assessed. The behavioural demands — pressure resilience under site conditions, communication clarity across trades and clients simultaneously, and structured thinking in high-ambiguity project environments — almost never do. The cost of placing the wrong person in this layer shows up in project delays, contract disputes, and team breakdown.

Trades Business Administration Office managers, bookkeepers, schedulers, and business support roles within trade businesses — plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and similar. The founder of a trades business is almost always the least equipped person in the building to assess an office hire behaviourally. These placements fail at a high rate, quietly, and the impact on cash flow, client relationships, and operations is significant. An underserved and under-assessed segment — and one where a structured process produces disproportionate value.

Hospitality & Events — Management Layer Venue managers, event coordinators, and operations managers in hospitality and events. Not floor staff — the management layer that holds the operation together. High pressure, high adaptability demands, and environments that move through the wrong hire very fast. The behavioural requirements for success here are clear. The hiring processes typically used to fill these roles are not.

Allied Health — Practice Administration Practice managers, patient coordinators, and clinic administrators. Healthcare founders and practitioners are among the most technically skilled and operationally dependent hirers in any industry — and among the least equipped to assess administrative and support staff behaviourally. Getting this hire wrong creates downstream patient experience and compliance risk that compounds quickly. Getting it right is transformative for a practice that wants to grow.

Don't see your role here? If you're a growing business making a hire that matters, get in touch. The methodology adapts to the role — not the other way around.

Book a discovery call

Before any candidate is assessed, we do the strategic work most processes skip entirely:

mapping your business environment honestly, defining what the role actually demands behaviourally, and identifying the conditions most likely to cause a hire to fail. Where sourcing is required, we build the candidate pool from a behavioural brief, not a job description. This attracts a fundamentally different pool than a standard job posting does. Every candidate, regardless of where they came from, then goes through the same structured assessment process.

The output isn't a shortlist. It's a documented determination — a scored, evidence-based recommendation that tells you who to hire and why, with the reasoning on paper.