Five beats. The boxes are lines to say. The grey text is what is true behind them.
← Control panelI interview salespeople for a living. When I started building training, I needed to know what level someone was actually at, because the same lesson is useless to two different people.
So I built a scale. And I borrowed the shape from language, A1 through C2, because everybody already knows what it means to be intermediate in Spanish.
Then in August I stopped guessing and started running it on real interviews.
Your files back the sequence. The quiz existed in March, the seven levels were written on June 10, the board that scores real interviews opened August 19. The one sentence only you can write is why you started. Say it in your own words and the beat is finished.
You know the language scale even if you have never heard the name. A1 is ordering coffee. B1 is holding a conversation. C2 is thinking in the language instead of translating in your head.
That is CEFR, the Council of Europe framework. Every level is written as something you can do, not something you know. And here is the part I love. It is not a test. It is the yardstick that everybody else’s tests get measured against.
Verified on coe.int. Six levels in three groups, basic user, independent user, proficient user. Descriptors are can-do statements. There is an official self-assessment grid, and it is deliberately separate from any exam. They added a whole new level seventeen years in, so a framework growing is normal.
There is a second idea underneath it. Two brothers at Berkeley studied how people get good at anything and found the same three stages every time.
First you follow the rules. Then you start seeing patterns and you bend the rules. Then you stop thinking about the rules at all, and that is what we call intuition.
That is why the scale has three groups, not seven separate things to memorize.
Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus, 1980. Five stages, novice to expert, and the arc is rules into intuition. Do not say “the Dreyfus model” without unpacking it, the name means nothing to the room and the idea means everything.
Here is what nobody wants to say out loud. When people rate themselves, they are wrong, and they are wrong in one direction.
A company called Section tested five thousand knowledge workers. Fifty four percent said they were proficient. Ten percent were.
We see exactly the same thing with our own two instruments. Everybody who took our quiz put themselves at the level of having a real system or higher. Half put themselves at the very top. When somebody else does the assessing, fewer than half get there, and about seven percent reach the top.
Section’s number is public and large, so lead with it. Your quiz group is small. Never give the count on air, and if someone asks, say it plainly rather than dodging. Shares only, and the framing is that yours confirms theirs.
After enough interviews you stop needing the scale. You can hear the level in the first sentence.
The tell, and this is the line to land on: a beginner describes something they have. Someone at the top describes something that happened while they were not there.