Beyond the CV: Advanced Screening Techniques Used by The Best Recruitment Companies

A CV is an important part of the recruitment process, but it can only tell you so much.

It can show where somebody has worked, the roles they have held and the experience they have chosen to highlight. What it can't tell you on its own is how effectively they performed, how they approach problems, how they communicate or how successfully their experience could transfer into your role.

This is particularly important in MedTech, where two candidates with similar job titles can have very different responsibilities and somebody without the obvious background may still have highly relevant transferable skills.

Effective candidate assessment therefore needs to go beyond matching CVs against a job description.

1. Start With What the Role Actually Requires

Before deciding how to assess candidates, decide what you're assessing them for.

Separate the requirements that somebody genuinely needs on day one from those that can realistically be learned.

For a Territory Manager, for example, you might need evidence of:

• Account development
• New business generation
• Territory planning
• Stakeholder management
• Commercial awareness
• Negotiation
• Resilience

A Clinical Specialist may need to demonstrate a different combination of skills, such as learning complex clinical information, communicating it clearly, supporting healthcare professionals and remaining calm in demanding clinical environments.

A Sales Manager may need evidence of coaching, leadership, commercial decision-making, performance management and developing other people.

Once you know what successful performance requires, you can build your assessment around finding evidence of those capabilities.

2. Don't Use the CV as a Scorecard

A CV should help you understand a candidate's background and identify areas to explore. It shouldn't become a checklist where points are awarded for every familiar company, product or job title.

Someone who has worked for a direct competitor may be an obvious candidate, but that doesn't automatically make them the strongest one.

Equally, somebody from an adjacent market may have experience of the same customers, similar sales cycles or comparable clinical environments.

Look at what the person has actually done rather than relying solely on where they have worked.

3. Use a Structured Interview

Unstructured interviews can easily become different conversations with different candidates.

One person is asked extensively about their sales performance. Another spends most of the interview discussing their current company. A third happens to build an immediate rapport with the interviewer and the conversation becomes more informal.

By the end, you're trying to compare candidates who haven't really been assessed in the same way.

A structured interview doesn't mean reading rigidly from a script.

It means identifying the important areas you need to assess and asking comparable core questions so that each candidate has an opportunity to provide relevant evidence.

You can still ask follow-up questions and explore individual answers in more detail.

4. Ask for Evidence, Not Claims

Most candidates know the qualities employers want to hear.

They can tell you they are resilient, commercially focused, excellent communicators and strong relationship builders.

The useful question is: what evidence supports that?

Instead of asking:

"Are you good at developing accounts?"

ask:

"Tell me about an account you personally developed. What was the situation when you took it over, what did you do and what changed as a result?"

Then explore the answer.

Who were the key stakeholders? What obstacles did they encounter? What did they personally do? What was the result? What would they do differently now?

Behavioural questions based on real examples can give you much stronger evidence than asking candidates to rate their own abilities.

5. Separate Individual Contribution From Team Success

This is particularly important in sales recruitment.

A candidate may have worked on a £5 million territory, represented a market-leading product or been part of a team that consistently exceeded target.

That's useful context, but it doesn't tell you what they personally contributed.

Explore the difference between the performance of the territory, product or team and the candidate's own achievements.

For example:

• What was the territory performing at when they inherited it?
• What changed while they were responsible for it?
• Which accounts did they personally develop?
• What new business did they win?
• What challenges did they have to overcome?
• What was their individual target and performance against it?

There is a significant difference between working on a successful territory and personally helping to make that territory successful.

6. Use Job-Relevant Assessments Where They Add Value

For some positions, a practical exercise can add useful evidence to the recruitment process.

The exercise should reflect something relevant to the role rather than being designed to catch candidates out.

For a sales position, you could provide a short customer or territory scenario and ask the candidate how they would approach it.

For a clinical or training position, you might provide some unfamiliar information, allow preparation time and ask them to explain it clearly.

For a management role, you could present a realistic team situation and ask how they would respond.

If presenting is an important part of the job, a presentation exercise may also be appropriate.

Be clear about what you're assessing and use broadly consistent criteria across candidates.

And keep the exercise proportionate. Candidates shouldn't be expected to spend hours producing free consultancy, territory plans or commercial strategies simply to progress through an interview process.

7. Assess Transferable Skills and Potential

Assessing beyond the CV becomes particularly important when you're considering candidates who don't have the conventional background.

An entry-level candidate, for example, cannot demonstrate five years of medical sales success.

They may still be able to provide strong evidence of:

• Communication
• Influencing
• Learning quickly
• Resilience
• Initiative
• Commercial awareness
• Building relationships
• Personal accountability

The evidence could come from another sales sector, healthcare, retail, hospitality, university, sport or other work experience.

Similarly, an experienced candidate moving between MedTech sectors may not know your exact product but could understand the customer environment, have experience of comparable sales cycles and demonstrate an ability to learn complex products quickly.

The question is not simply whether they have done the exact job before. It is whether there is credible evidence that they could succeed in yours.

8. Explore Motivation and Working Preferences

Skills and experience are only part of a successful appointment.

You also need to understand what the candidate wants from their next move and whether that matches what the role can genuinely offer.

Explore why they are considering leaving their current employer, what attracts them to your opportunity and what they want from their next manager, team and career move.

You might also discuss:

• The level of autonomy they are comfortable with
• How they prefer to be managed
• The amount of travel involved
• The balance between new business and account management
• Expectations around clinical support or training
• Career development
• The type of working environment in which they perform best

This gives you much more useful information than trying to decide whether somebody is a vague "cultural fit".

The aim isn't to hire somebody who is similar to the people you already employ. It's to understand whether their motivations, expectations and ways of working are compatible with the reality of the role.

9. Be Consistent Across Candidates

Good candidate assessment isn't about finding an increasingly elaborate collection of tests.

Often, consistency makes a bigger difference.

Decide the core criteria before interviewing and assess candidates against those criteria rather than allowing the requirements to change depending on who is sitting in front of you.

If one candidate gives an excellent example of winning new business, for instance, don't suddenly make new business experience more important than it was when you defined the role.

Likewise, don't overlook a requirement simply because you particularly like another candidate.

A simple assessment framework can help interviewers bring the evidence back to the requirements of the job.

10. Use Technology as a Tool, Not the Decision-Maker

Applicant tracking systems and other recruitment technology can help employers organise applications and manage recruitment processes, particularly when application volumes are high.

AI can also support some recruitment tasks.

But technology shouldn't replace a clear understanding of what you're looking for.

A system searching CVs for particular job titles, employers or keywords may miss candidates whose relevant experience is described differently.

The more specialised the role, the more important it can be to understand the context behind somebody's experience rather than relying solely on whether particular words appear on their CV.

11. Bring the Evidence Together Before You Decide

After the interviews and assessments are complete, return to the criteria you agreed at the beginning.

What evidence has each candidate provided?

Where are their strengths?

Where are the gaps?

Which gaps could realistically be addressed through training and which are genuinely important to performance from day one?

Try to separate evidence from impressions.

"I really liked them" isn't evidence that somebody can succeed in the role.

Equally, "they haven't worked for one of our competitors" isn't evidence that they can't.

Go Beyond the CV, Not Beyond What Matters

Assessing candidates beyond their CV doesn't mean introducing more stages, more tests or more complicated recruitment processes.

In fact, adding unnecessary assessments can make hiring slower without improving the decision.

The aim is much simpler.

Understand what success in the role actually requires. Ask candidates for relevant evidence. Explore what they personally contributed. Test important capabilities where it genuinely adds value. Consider transferable skills and potential where appropriate. Then compare candidates consistently against the requirements of the job.

A CV tells you where somebody has been.

A good assessment process helps you decide what they could do next.