Since 2003 we have sourced and selected talent for resource management, recycling and renewable energy, and nothing else. We take a human-first, scientific approach: define what great looks like for the specific role, then find the people who fit that definition.
Clients win, candidates win and the sector benefits.
How we work
Most recruitment processes collect opinions and call the loudest one a decision. Ours produces evidence at the points where a hiring decision is actually made.
What does “great” look like, and which competencies deliver high performance in the role? We agree it with you before anyone is approached.
Produces evidenceWe search the talent pool for candidates with the right skills and experience.
We work with you to shortlist the candidates who will be assessed for the role, measured against what we agreed at the start.
Using our bespoke process, we help you assess every candidate to ensure the right fit for the role and your business.
Produces evidenceWe support you through the offer stage, onboarding and candidate management, and stay involved beyond the start date.
The two stages marked above produce a document rather than an opinion: a benchmark of what great looks like, and a briefing on every candidate from our business psychologists. Both are below.
Assessments
Personality assessment and situational judgement tests, designed in-house by our business psychologists and calibrated against this sector rather than office workers in general.
You receive a one-page briefing per shortlisted candidate: strengths, the risks worth knowing about, and the questions that will tell you which you are dealing with.
Emerging strength: There are indications of strength in this area compared with many people, although this is not consistently pronounced. The individual is likely to generate workable ideas and show willingness to put them into practice, particularly in familiar contexts where the problem is well-defined.
Interview focus: At interview, ask for an improvement they proposed and saw through to implementation. Listen for what they did personally to get it delivered, not just the idea.
Patterns to explore:
No clear indication of this pattern in the profile. The combination it describes – strong practical idea generation alongside lower follow-through into delivery – was not found in the responses.
Emerging strength: There are indications of strength in this area compared with many people, although this is not consistently pronounced. The individual is likely to think in longer time horizons and show some capacity for strategic ideation, although the analytical grounding or external awareness needed to fully develop these ideas may not yet be consistently strong.
Interview focus: At interview, ask about a longer-term idea or direction they put forward. Listen for how they grounded it in evidence and how they made the case to others.
Patterns to explore:
No clear indication of this pattern in the profile. The combination it describes – a strongly positive strategic outlook alongside lower caution or deliberation – was not found in the responses.
The science behind the shortlist
Business Psychologist
Psychology × technology. Ben builds the applications that administer our assessments and generate the reports. AI can enable the process, but it doesn’t remove the human insight into what success in a specific role looks like.
Business Psychologist
Evidence-led, human first. Paula designs assessment processes that are engaging and tailored to a company’s needs, and makes sure the candidate experience stays a good one throughout.
Measures · Operational judgement under pressure
A weighbridge fault is causing a queue of collection vehicles to back up onto the public road. Your site manager is off-site, the maintenance contractor cannot attend for three hours, and two drivers are approaching their permitted hours.
What do you do first?
What this tells you
The distinction is rarely knowledge. Most candidates know the compliance position. It is whether someone protects the public highway and driver hours while keeping the site auditable, or optimises for one of those at the cost of the others.
Situational judgement
A situational judgement test puts a candidate in a scenario they will actually face and asks what they would do. There is rarely one right answer. What it surfaces is the shape of someone’s judgement.
Ours are written around real waste and resource operations, which is why they tell you something a generic aptitude test cannot.
The item shown is an illustrative mock-up. Our full library is designed by our in-house business psychologists and calibrated per role.
Industries we work in
We recruit across the whole of waste, resource management and energy, from the weighbridge to the boardroom. Staying inside one industry is what lets us tell you which skills genuinely transfer between them.
Selected client work
Coventry City Council
Coventry City Council set out to design and build its own materials recovery facility. The brief was deliberately awkward: someone who knows MRFs, who would spend three years building one instead of running one, and be interviewed inside six weeks.
Read the case studyEpendys
A European plastics trading company expanding into the UK needed a Country Manager — a first hire, made remotely from Germany, where a wrong appointment would have been the whole venture rather than one role.
Read the case studyProven track record
WasteRecruit helped us secure an excellent candidate for our Key Account Manager role.
Working with WasteRecruit gave us a much deeper understanding of the candidates than a traditional interview process alone.
Working with WasteRecruit gave us confidence that we were assessing candidates against the behaviours that would genuinely make a difference in the role.
A confidential first conversation
You will speak directly with Crystal Fraser, our Account Manager, who knows the companies and candidates in this market. We can challenge the brief before you spend time advertising it.