Take a job that everyone wants, a labour-intensive recruitment process and the chance to create a new business niche — and going to the dogs has proved to be a win-win situation for Sheffield’s Benchmark Recruit.

The executive and commercial recruitment specialists helped the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association with their annual selection of Guide Dogmobility instructors across the UK. Benchmark’s fiveperson team scored, and double scored, applications using sharply defined competency criteria to identify the top scoring 14 candidates for interview.

More than 600 hopefuls applied through the Guide Dogs website to fill no more than 10 slots. “It’s one of those jobs everyone wants,” director Louisa Harrison- Walker told Recruiter. Benchmark’s part of the job had to be done within two weeks.

Harrison-Walker said the project was helping the agency develop a new set of CV processing and screening services to offer clients faced with similarrecruitment challenges.