We say “top 0.1% of applicants accepted” on every page of this site. People ask what that actually means. It is not a stat we invented for a hero section. It is the floor: fewer than 1 in 1,000 of the people who apply make it onto our team.
The selection happens in five stages. We do not coach anyone through them. The stages are the filter, not the curriculum.
Five filters, in order
Stage 1: written application. Five short questions, none of them clever. The signal we are reading is precision. Do you say what you mean in one pass, or do you bury the answer at the bottom of a paragraph? Around 70% of applicants do not make it past this stage.
Stage 2: live writing sample. A 25-minute timed exercise: a real email an account manager would send on behalf of a real client. We score it on tone match, factual correctness, and the question we always ask: would this email pass undetected as written by the client themselves? Most do not.
Stage 3: structured interview. Forty-five minutes with two of us, scoring against a fixed rubric. We are looking for judgment, not personality. Specifically: can you describe a moment where you owned an outcome that was not in your job description?
Stage 4: paid trial. Two to three weeks of supervised assignments against a real account manager. This is the most expensive filter for us and the most informative one. Reliability under pressure is a thing you can only measure by exposing someone to pressure.
Stage 5: background and identity. Criminal-record check, identity verification, signed confidentiality. Every assistant on the team has cleared this floor.
What we are not looking for
We are not looking for a perfect resume. We are not looking for a specific country of origin. We are not looking for someone who will be the cheapest. We are looking for someone who is already a seasoned professional on the day they start, because the work begins the day they start.
