What 45 minutes on camera reveals about a lead planner that a CV never will

The problem with CVs

A CV is a document produced by the candidate, curated to flatter, and reviewed by a hiring manager who first saw it 90 seconds before the call. As a basis for a six-figure decision, this is, charitably, suboptimal. It is not a criticism of candidates; it is an observation about the information quality at the point where decisions get anchored. The Lead Planner role is a useful lens, because the gap between CV quality and actual performance is routinely wide.

What a lead planner actually does

A Lead Planner on a major HV project owns one of its most commercially sensitive documents: the programme.

The role includes

• Developing and maintaining a Level 3 or Level 4 programme (Primavera P6 or MS Project)
• Managing programme logic, constraints, and critical path
• Coordinating civil, electrical, commissioning, and procurement inputs
• Tracking progress against baseline and advising on recovery options
• Period reporting: narratives, lookaheads, earned value
• Supporting extension-of-time claims and delay analysis

None of this is simple. But almost every Lead Planner CV says the same things: Primavera P6, critical path, stakeholder reporting, earned value, whether the person ran a £200m substation programme or just updated a tracker on a small civils package. CVs tell you what software someone has used. Video assessments tell you whether they understand why it matters.

What 45 minutes on camera reveals

Commercial awareness under pressure

We pose scenarios that demand real-time commercial thinking, such as: "You are three weeks into a ten-week commissioning phase. A client-supplied delivery on the critical path is now two weeks late. Walk me through your immediate actions." The answer reveals whether they understand the contractual notification for an EoT claim, how they would compress downstream activities, how they break difficult news to a client, and whether they are thinking about commercial consequences, not just the schedule. A CV cannot reveal any of that.

Depth of programme logic

Many candidates call themselves expert P6 users. Few can articulate why resource-loading matters, distinguish total float from free float and explain why the difference is commercially important, or produce a meaningful critical path on a project with 1'400 activities and five hundred interface dependencies. Specific, probing questions on camera, where you cannot quietly look things up, separate genuine practitioners from competent users fast.

Communication under pressure

A Lead Planner spends much of their life delivering news people would rather not hear. "The programme is at risk" has real commercial consequences. How they deliver it, clearly, confidently, with a recovery proposal, matters enormously, and video captures it where a CV cannot.

The structure of our lead planner assessment

The assessment runs 45 minutes, and the recording reaches the hiring manager and project director within 24 hours. Multiple decision-makers review the same assessment independently, then align on a shortlist without the overhead of separate first-round interviews.

What it does not replace

It does not replace the technical interview. It replaces the phone screen and first-round interview, the least structured stages of most processes. By the time a candidate reaches your team, you already know they can communicate clearly, think under pressure, and have genuine depth. You are no longer spending your most expensive resource, senior engineering time, filtering out people who should have been filtered three steps earlier. On average the 45-minute assessment saves four to six hours of senior engineering time per candidate. Across a shortlist of ten, that is a full week returned to your delivery team.