The guide
He’s read your CV the way they read it.
Recruitment taught him what coaching usually guesses.
Daniel started on a graduate desk in 2009, cold-calling engineering managers in a Manchester call centre. By 2016 he was placing heads of engineering, data and product; by 2019 he was a director running a twelve-person tech practice, reviewing hundreds of senior CVs a month and sitting in the client debriefs where they got rejected — usually in under ninety seconds.
That vantage point is the whole practice. He knows which signals get a senior application read, what interviewers at scale-ups actually score, when a counter-offer is real, and what a negotiation can take before goodwill cracks. None of it is mystical. Almost none of it is written down anywhere candidates can see.
He left agency recruitment in 2021 — the year the best part of the job, the routing conversations with people he couldn’t place, became the job itself. Ascent has worked with 400+ professionals since: mostly engineers, product people, designers and marketers between five and twenty years in.
How he works
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Market first, feelings second
What you want matters; what the market is paying for decides the route. Both go on the table in week one.
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Campaigns, not scattergun
Twelve targeted applications beat one hundred and twenty sprayed ones. Every client runs a tracked campaign with a weekly review.
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No false summits
If the honest answer is “stay and renegotiate” or “wait two quarters”, that’s the route card you get. About one review in five ends that way.