Mission & values
Recruitment built on maths, not pattern-matching
UK recruitment screens out the people it should let in. We built ProperFit Hire to fix that — by scoring CVs against jobs the way regulators actually require, and by treating the candidates other platforms ignore as the people most worth helping.
Why this was built
Brian Gillingham is the founder. CIPD Level 7, fifteen years in regulated-sector recruitment, based in Lincoln. He spent a decade watching the same thing happen, every shortlist:
- Applicant Tracking Systems reject CVs that don't include the right keywords. Good candidates with the wrong vocabulary go to the bottom of the pile.
- Sector-specific qualifications get misread. NVQ Level 4 in adult social care is not the same thing as Level 4 in retail. Generic platforms can't tell.
- Right-to-work checks get repeated, badly, for every employer. People prove the same thing five times to apply for five jobs.
- Disabled and neurodivergent candidates are screened out before any human reads their application.
- Returners — parents, carers, ex-services personnel, people coming back from illness — get penalised for the gap, not credited for what they did during it.
So we built the engine that scores the way the regulator actually checks: CQC's "fit and proper persons" test, KCSIE 2025 safer-recruitment, FCA SMCR statements of responsibility, SRA standards, NMC pin verification. Pass our scoring and you'd pass an audit. Fail it and we tell you exactly why, with the regulation cited.
The thesis. When the maths is honest and the audit trail is real, employers can hire the people the algorithm would have filtered out. That's not charity — it's how you fill 152,000 vacancies in care alone.
Mission
To make UK recruitment in regulated sectors mathematically honest, sector-aware, and accessible to every candidate the algorithm currently locks out.
Concretely:
- Free, forever, for candidates. Employers pay; you don't. Every prep pack, CV review, RTW locker, interview pack, accessibility adjustment — free.
- Math, not keywords. We score CVs the way audit-first hiring requires, with the regulation cited. You see the score, and you see the reason.
- Sector-aware compliance built in. Care (CQC), healthcare (NMC/GMC/HCPC), finance (FCA/SMCR), legal (SRA), education (KCSIE), construction (CSCS), security (SIA) — the actual regulators, the actual current standards.
- Inclusion is the design, not a tickbox. Disability Confident-aware. Neuroaffirming prep. Adjustments passport. Easy-read mode. Right-to-work share-once.
Our values
🧮 Honest
Every score has a number, every number has a reason, every reason cites a regulation or a measurable input. If we can't show our working, we don't ship the feature.
🤝 Open
We say what we got wrong. We tell candidates which gaps will hurt them and how to close them. We tell employers when their JD is biased. We don't manage perceptions.
♿ Accessible
Every feature has to work for the candidate using a screen reader, the candidate who needs more time, the candidate who can't use a mouse, the candidate who finds eye-contact difficult. If it doesn't, it isn't shipped.
🔒 Audit-ready
We hold candidate data the way the ICO would want us to. We delete it on request and on schedule. We never sell it. The only third parties we share data with are the ones the candidate asks us to.
🇬🇧 UK-first
Built for UK regulated sectors with UK legislation. We don't fudge US frameworks into UK contexts. We track changes — Worker Protection Act 2024, KCSIE annual updates, BRP card expiry, Building Safety Act 2022.
🌱 Long-game
Recruitment is downstream of training is downstream of confidence is downstream of opportunity. We help candidates upgrade their CV, prep their interview, and prove their right to work — because better-prepared candidates make better hires for the employers who pay us.
Who today's recruitment locks out
UK Office for National Statistics data (2024-25) and sector regulator reporting consistently surface the same exclusions. These are the groups most likely to have their CV rejected before a human reads it:
Groups currently underserved by mainstream UK recruitment
- Disabled candidates — physical, sensory, cognitive, mental-health-related. Disability Confident scheme exists; many employers tick the box without adapting. Disability employment gap: 28.6 percentage points (ONS, 2024).
- Neurodivergent candidates — autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette's. Interview formats designed around neurotypical communication penalise them. Only 22% of autistic adults are in any kind of paid work (Buckland Review, 2024).
- Returners from career breaks — parents who took time out, family carers, people recovering from illness, people who stepped back to support a partner. CV gaps trigger automatic ATS deprioritisation.
- Older workers (50+) — age discrimination is unlawful, common, and largely invisible. Over-50s are 50% more likely to be long-term unemployed than 25-49 year-olds (CIPD, 2025).
- Ex-service personnel — military experience translates to civilian skills, but the vocabulary doesn't match a generic JD parser. The MOD's Career Transition Partnership exists; most platforms don't speak its language.
- Ex-offenders — including people on Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL), people who've completed sentences, and rehabilitation candidates. Spent vs unspent convictions are misunderstood by employers.
- Care leavers — young adults who came out of the care system. Fewer than 6% of care leavers reach higher education vs the national average. They start adult life with smaller networks.
- Refugees and asylum seekers with right to work — share codes confuse recruiters; foreign qualifications go unrecognised by UK ATSes.
- People with chronic illness — Long COVID, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, severe migraine, IBD. Reasonable adjustments under Equality Act 2010 are a right, but disclosing them at application stage feels career-ending.
- People with mental health conditions — over 1 in 6 of the UK working-age population. Disclosure penalty is real, even when the law is on the candidate's side.
- Foster carers and kinship carers — fluctuating availability, court attendance, training requirements. Genuinely valuable life skills; rarely recognised on a CV.
- Working-class candidates without LinkedIn networks — no warm intros, no referral pathway, applications go into the void.
- Travellers and Roma/Gypsy/Traveller candidates — face documented bias in screening; few employers track this protected characteristic.
- Non-degree-holders in roles with arbitrary degree requirements — most UK roles still list a degree as required when the actual job needs none.
- People escaping domestic abuse or trafficking — often need flexible hours, short notice changes, and confidentiality at every stage. Standard application flows can't accommodate this.
- Single parents — penalised for needing predictable hours; rarely get the rota detail to make an informed choice.
What we do for them
- Disability/neurodivergence-aware adjustments passport on every account. Tick the box once, share with every employer.
- Math-based CV scoring that doesn't depend on the right buzzwords — translates synonyms, recognises sector-specific qualifications.
- Free interview prep packs tailored to the exact role and employer (cover, history, named values, likely questions, reverse questions, stats grid). Bespoke deep-research mode for any UK employer.
- Share-once Right to Work locker — gov.uk share code stored, attached to every application.
- Easy-read mode for candidates who need plain language.
- Identity verification with adjustment — selfie + ID, with extra time, BSL interpreter referral, or quiet-room flag.
- Sector-current document checklist — what to bring, why it matters, when it expires.
- Career-break-aware scoring — gaps don't penalise; we score what you've got.
Who pays for it
UK employers in regulated sectors who want better-prepared candidates and shorter shortlists. Cohort scoring is £99 one-off; retainer is £249/month. That pays for everything we give candidates for free. The economics work because better-prepared candidates make better hires.
What we won't do
- Sell candidate data. Ever. To anyone.
- Charge candidates for any feature. Ever.
- Use a candidate's accessibility disclosure to filter them out of opportunities.
- Pretend our scoring is unbiased. We tell you which inputs are weighted how, and how to argue with us.
- Run unaudited LLM-only screening. Every score has a deterministic backbone.