Nine people who did the work before anyone asked.
You will read forty CVs this month. Thirty-eight of them will say "results-driven" and "excellent communicator". You will spend twenty hours in interviews and come out genuinely unable to tell half of them apart.
The thing you actually need to know is not on any of those CVs. Will this person put the work in when nobody is watching them?
Nine people have just answered that for you.
They trained before anyone offered them a job
They came through the meritt cohort last month. In their own time, off their own back. No employer paid for it. No job was waiting at the end of it.
That is the part worth pausing on.
Sales training almost always happens in the wrong order. You hire someone, you spend three months onboarding them, and you find out in month four whether the bet paid off. By then you have spent the money and the quarter. The industry average for quota attainment is 42%, and a mis-hired rep costs around £150,000 once you count salary, lost pipeline and the ramp you never got back.
These nine went the other way round. They learned what the job actually is, then went looking for it. Nobody was checking. They did it anyway.
What that tells you that an interview cannot
At meritt we screen for four things: curiosity, coachability, grit and communication. You can teach someone your product, your market and your process. You cannot teach those four.
The awkward truth about interviews is that they are very poor at measuring any of them. Grit does not show up in a 45 minute conversation. Coachability certainly does not. You are usually guessing, and you find out you guessed wrong somewhere around month five.
Someone who trained themselves has already shown you three of the four before you have said a word to them. They chose to learn. They stuck with it when it got boring. They finished.
That is not a small signal. It is most of what you are trying to work out.
They know what the job is
The other thing that changes is the conversation you have with them.
They will not ask you what an SDR does. They already know what a bad day on the phones feels like, why an objection is the job rather than an interruption, and what a decent first message looks like. They will research you properly before they turn up, because they have been taught to, and they can talk about their own value without either apologising for it or overselling it.
You have interviewed enough people to know how rare that combination is.
Meet them
All nine are on the meritt cohort wall. Every name links to their full profile, so you can read about someone properly before you decide whether to speak to them.
There is no fee to interview any of them. If someone looks right, click through and we will set it up.
We run a new cohort every month, so if none of these nine are right, the next group is already training. Learn more about meritt.