Every Seek application read in full and scored against the job as advertised: 30 hours, remote, $32 an hour, $250 a qualified lead, and around 300 cold calls a week. Steven Mannion, who rang you directly and has already been interviewed, sits in the ranking alongside the rest.
Steven built and sold lead generation as a business, and closed a technical product cold into North America from a Wellington spare room. That is the highest ceiling here by a distance, and it is the reason $32 an hour on 30 hours is unlikely to hold him. His LinkedIn says he wants a full-time SaaS role where he owns pipeline and revenue. Hire him knowing that and structure the offer for it.
Steven Mannion. Best capability, worst retention odds. Ask him what he does when a $120k AE role appears in month three.
Kevin Marsh. Twenty years inside building and construction, your best vertical, and already cold calling remotely part time. Eleven and five-year tenures.
Jay Donnell. 250 dials a day right now, and he sent a cold pitch instead of a cover letter. All B2C, and the money is a promotion for him.
Ollie Rowntree, 20, no cover letter, and running your exact motion at a software startup today. He built his own prospect list at 18.
Click a row to open the full record. Sort on any column heading. Scores run out of 100 across seven weighted criteria taken from the advert and from what you told Steven in the interview: self-generated pipeline, live demo, sell and hand over, trades focus.
| # | Candidate | Based | Currently | Job changes | Cover letter | Fit | Call |
|---|
One entry per applicant in rank order, carrying the score breakdown, the case for and against, what to verify before you spend time, the questions to put to that person, the full text of everything they sent, and their original files.
Four agents to build and four numbers to hand out. Give each shortlisted candidate the brief, tell them they are selling Automate AI voice agents to four New Zealand businesses, and let the transcripts do the interviewing. Persona D carries the most weight: you pay $250 a qualified lead, so the expensive failure is a rep who books rubbish rather than one who cannot close.
Score each line 1 to 5 per call. Pass mark: 24 out of 40 on personas A to C, a booked next step on at least two of the three, and a clean disqualification on D. A candidate who books Marge fails whatever else they scored.
Put these to every shortlisted candidate in this order, before their individual probes. They are built around the two things you told Steven you need: someone who generates their own pipeline, and a qualified lead worth the $250 you pay for it.
Build the four agents, hand the numbers to Steven, Kevin, Jay, Mickael, Michele and Tania, and score the transcripts against the rubric above. That single exercise will tell you more than another round of interviews.