"Pre-vetted" is one of the most overused words in hiring. Every marketplace and staffing firm says it, and it usually means a CV was read and a call was held. For us it means something narrower and more expensive: roughly 1 in 400 applicants becomes a Distilled Expert, a placement rate of about 0.25 percent.
This post is the why behind that number. Our vetting page lists the stages; here we explain what each stage is built to catch, what failure looks like at each one, and why the final decision is never ours.
Of every 400 people who apply, about 160 pass the first screen, about 40 survive the skills and audit stage, about 4 pass the live interview, and 1 is placed, after references and your own interview.
Every stage exists because a specific kind of bad hire gets through without it.
Applications come in through LinkedIn, referrals and partner networks. We ask for the things a CV hides: the budgets actually managed, the accounts actually owned, and the results with numbers attached.
What it catches: people applying for a title rather than a job. Nearly everyone who lists "performance marketing" has run a campaign. Far fewer have owned a channel end to end.
We screen for experience, portfolio, real results, technical skill and English. The bar here is concrete: five or more years of experience on average, a portfolio that is required and verified rather than optional, and English at C1 or C2, because an embedded expert sits in your standups and writes to your executives.
What it catches: self-reported impact. A claim like "scaled ROAS 3x" is not evidence until we know the account, the spend and the period. About 40 percent of applicants pass.
This is where most of the funnel narrows, and it is the stage we would keep if we could keep only one. Candidates complete a platform-fluency test, a data-interpretation exercise, and an audit of a real account in their channel: a live Meta Ads account for paid social, a live Google Ads account for PPC, a technical site audit for SEO. They present what they found, on video or live.
What it catches: people who know the vocabulary but not the work. An audit exposes it within minutes. The strong candidates start with structure and tracking before they touch bids or creative, they rank what they found by impact, and they say plainly what they would need to know before deciding. The weak ones produce a long list of observations in no particular order. About 10 percent of applicants remain after this stage.
A 60-minute conversation covering strategy, scenarios and culture fit. We pressure-test the audit (why this change before that one, what would you do with half the budget) and put candidates in the situations they will actually face: performance dropping for two weeks, a founder asking for results the data cannot support, a creative team that is behind.
What it catches: people who do good work but cannot explain it, and people who explain well but fold under a hard question. Both fail as embedded experts, because the job is half doing the work and half bringing a client team along with it. About 1 percent of applicants remain.
Reference and background checks, then a scorecard across six dimensions:
What it catches: the gap between interview performance and working history. References tell us what someone was like in month nine, which no interview can.
Only then do we match. You get a shortlist of two to three experts within 7 days, chosen for your stack, your goals and how your team works. You interview them and make the call. Nobody is placed without the client's own interview.
Why it is yours: we can test skill, but only you can judge fit with your team, your founder's style and the way your company makes decisions. The vetting exists so that every name on your shortlist is someone you could hire; the choice between them should be yours.
Vetting reduces risk; it does not remove it. So every match is backed by a free replacement guarantee: in the first 30 days, a replacement with no questions asked, and through 90 days, a free replacement for genuine performance issues against agreed goals.
The number the whole process is built to produce is not the placement rate. It is retention. Distilled placements last 18+ months on average, and that is the figure we watch most closely, because a marketer who stays long enough to learn your business is worth more than any shortlist.
Most of the stages above are expensive for us. The audit takes hours to set up and review; the live interview takes a senior person an hour per candidate; the references take days. A marketplace could skip most of it and place people faster.
We keep it because the failure mode we are protecting you from is the expensive one: a hire who looks right for three months and quietly costs you a year. A shortlist in 7 days is fast enough. A bad hire is never fast.
If you want to see who comes out of the other end, tell us the gap and you will be interviewing a shortlist within 7 days.