Hiring a nursery practitioner
A vacancy that cannot stay open, because ratios are a legal requirement rather than a preference. Qualification level and vetting are absolute gates, the pile is large, and the quality that actually matters is almost impossible to read off a CV.
Two hard gates, a big pile, and the real signal buried under both. Qualification level and clearance are yes-or-no facts that decide eligibility outright — and every hour spent reading someone who fails them is wasted twice, because the room is still short. Beyond the gates, early-years CVs converge on the same paperwork vocabulary: EYFS, observations, key person, planning cycles. All of it is learnable and none of it distinguishes the practitioner children actually settle with. The false positive is a CV heavy on documentation experience and silent on what they do in the room.
What she asks before she writes a single requirement
Selene asks what a regulated, ratio-critical room turns on: qualification level, age group, and how much of the job is paperwork versus floor time.
Level, room, and how much of the job is paperwork
Not the questions an office role gets. Selene goes after the qualification level you can accept, which room they'd be in, and whether this person carries key-person responsibility — because that decides whether documentation is a criterion or an afterthought.
One sentence changes the guide
Every early-years manager describes it slightly differently and they all mean the same thing. It matters because the default guide — years, qualification, EYFS familiarity — ranks the confident paperwork candidate top, and that is not who the manager is picturing.
Exceptional, not just good —
“You can tell in the first ten minutes. Some of them get down on the floor with the children. Some of them supervise from a chair.”
→ Hands-on engagement outranked documentation fluency, which stayed important but stopped leading.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria. Three are eligibility facts that belong on the application page; the rest weight what happens in the room above what happens in the folder.
Settle qualification and vetting before anything is read
Two of the three gates here are legal rather than preferential, and neither is a judgment a CV can settle reliably. Putting them on the application page means the answer arrives with the application — and it lets you accept "working towards Level 3" explicitly, which a keyword filter on "Level 3" would silently reject. On a 140-applicant pile that is a meaningful number of eligible people who would otherwise be lost.
Scored on practice, not on paperwork
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
In a regulated setting the shortlist has to survive being asked about, and what ranked someone is the evidence against the guide — which is exactly what the record shows an inspector later.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning the brief into requirements, and the legal gates into application-page questions
- Reading all 140 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist, with the room-practice evidence quoted
- A decision record that still explains itself months later, to whoever asks
Yours
- Advertising the vacancy — Selene doesn't post to job boards or sourcing sites
- All vetting, references and qualification verification before anyone starts; she records what candidates state, she doesn't verify it
- The interview and any time in the room, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Try it on your next room vacancy
Baby room or preschool, one leaver to replace or a whole new room opening — describe the setting and the guide arrives built for it.