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We don’t prioritize it, and here’s why — even though we completely understand the appeal. “This person sat on Stanford’s admissions committee! If anyone knows what they’re looking for, it’s them!” It makes intuitive sense. Who better than the gatekeeper?

But think about it this way. A food critic who’s reviewed hundreds of restaurants knows exactly what makes a great dining experience. That doesn’t make them a great chef. The skills are adjacent but fundamentally different — one evaluates, the other creates. A former admissions officer can tell you what they used to look for at one institution during the years they served. That’s a data point, and it can be interesting. But the job of an admissions consultant isn’t to evaluate your application from behind a desk — it’s to sit across from a seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know their own story yet and coax it out of them. To build strategy across twelve schools, not just the one where they used to work. To coach, not just judge.

We’ve worked with former deans. Some had valuable perspectives. But we found the value of those insider insights to be ephemeral — useful as background knowledge, not as a consulting superpower. Meanwhile, the skills that actually move the needle — diagnostic instinct, emotional intelligence, the ability to adapt coaching style to wildly different personalities — those are things a former dean may or may not have. We’d take a better consultant pound-for-pound over a former dean of Harvard any day of the week. The dean credential helps you make more sales. It doesn’t automatically produce better work or better outcomes for the client. And that’s our standard.

We look for coaching talent above everything else. It’s a plus if someone has personally navigated competitive admissions and understands the DNA of people who get into the world’s top institutions. But beyond that baseline, what we care about is whether they can bring the heat.

Here’s our honest view on experience: it’s overrated by itself. We would rather have the equivalent of a Roger Federer or Carlos Alcaraz in their rookie year — someone with freakish instincts, natural feel for the craft, and the kind of competitive drive that makes everyone around them better — over a fifteen-year veteran who’s competent but has plateaued. Experience plus talent can be extraordinary. But talent alone, with the right environment, will outperform experience alone every single time. For us, coaching talent is the experience that matters most. Everything else — knowledge of specific schools, familiarity with application platforms, understanding of committee dynamics — can be learned quickly by someone who has the underlying gift. The gift itself can’t be taught.

This is one of the things we’re most proud of, because it’s genuinely rare. Most firms silo their consultants. They protect “company interests” by keeping experts isolated from each other — partly out of fear that collaboration leads to people leaving, partly because their business model doesn’t incentivize knowledge-sharing. Our philosophy is the opposite. We recruit genuine, invested people and we’re not worried about coups. We know that when talented, sincere people talk to other talented people, only good things result.

Our consultants communicate with each other regularly — sharing observations, swapping insights about specific schools, pressure-testing strategic approaches for tricky cases. Think of it like a teaching hospital where the doctors actually talk to each other across specialties rather than guarding their department’s turf. In fact, our entire service model was born from what was almost an accidental collaboration — two different approaches to the admissions problem combining forces and discovering that the synthesis was dramatically more powerful than either one alone. That spirit of combining expertise is baked into everything we do. Shared resources, shared knowledge, shared culture. For our consultants, this is a huge value-add — they get sharper by being part of a squad, not in spite of it.

Recruiting standards. This is where it starts and ends, and it’s shockingly absent at most firms in this space.

Here’s how we think about it — something we call the VIP standard. Imagine the highest-stakes client imaginable walks through the door. Family of a close friend. Someone where the outcome matters to us personally, beyond just professionally. If we could only feel confident assigning that person to one or two consultants on our roster, then our standards aren’t high enough. The bar we hold ourselves to is this: we should be able to assign any consultant, blind, to the most important client who’s ever walked through our door, and feel completely confident that they’re getting the best in class. That’s not aspirational language — it’s the actual filtering criterion. Every person on our team passed that test. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be here.

Think of it like a great architect working with a master builder. Your lead consultant is the architect — they design the vision, define the narrative strategy, decide what story the application needs to tell and why. The essay specialist is the builder — they get into the material, working at the sentence level to make the writing precise, compelling, and unmistakably yours. The specialist always operates in service of the consultant’s strategic guidance, never in a rogue capacity. It’s not two people giving you conflicting advice — it’s one unified vision executed with two complementary skill sets.

What makes this particularly powerful is that both bring fresh eyes to the work. The consultant sees the forest; the specialist sees the grain of the wood. When a particular challenge comes up — an essay that isn’t clicking, a narrative angle that needs rethinking — our consultants will often put the question to the broader crew. There’s a discussion, different perspectives surface, and the outcome is almost always richer than any single person would have produced alone. That kind of open, collaborative problem-solving is rare in this industry. Most firms don’t trust their people enough to allow it. We built ours around it.

Like any business, we learned through our own early trials. On day one, we didn’t have a perfect system for identifying what made a consultant exceptional versus merely good. But we were relentless about figuring it out. Over time — through hundreds of engagements, honest post-cycle debriefs, and paying very close attention to which clients had transformative experiences versus satisfactory ones — we identified the strongest signals. What to look for. What the desirable qualities actually are, both for the client’s experience and for the kind of people we want to work alongside.

More importantly, we got better at detecting and screening for those qualities from the jump. The recruiting process we run today is the product of years of refinement — learning what predicts great performance, what looks promising on paper but doesn’t translate, and what the rare gems who “have it all” actually look like before they’ve worked a single case for us. When you get that filter right — when every person on the team earned their spot through a process that’s been pressure-tested across hundreds of hires — the feedback writes itself. Our clients tell us what we already know: they’re in good hands. And when something isn’t working, we hear that too, quickly, because we’ve built the kind of trust where families tell us the truth.