When a brief comes into Scallent, we don't hand-pick who'll do it. We run a consultation: the brief goes to every profile in the pool that meets the criteria for that job, and whoever wants to responds with a quote.
The interesting part starts afterwards, when three or five responses are on the table and a decision has to be made.
Why price doesn't decide on its own
The reflex is to sort by total and take the bottom one. It's a bad reflex, for a simple reason: a total is only comparable if it's covering the same thing.
It happened to us while building this. In a test consultation with five responses, the system ranked the cheapest proposal first. Looking closer, the cheapest proposal was cheaper because it had only quoted half the lines in the brief. It wasn't the best one: it was the shortest one.
We fixed two things. First, an incomplete response now sits always behind every complete response, regardless of score — it isn't a penalty, it's a different category. Second, the median price used as a reference is now calculated over complete responses only, because a proposal covering half the scope was dragging the median down and making the serious proposals look expensive.
What goes into the comparison
Each response is read on five axes, and none of them is enough on its own:
Price. Not the lowest — the distance from the median of complete proposals. Well above needs explaining; well below needs explaining too.
Fit. How closely the profile matches what the brief asked for. Not "is a good designer": "does print-ready artwork", when the brief ends at a printer.
Speed. What the person commits to, against what the project needs. A shorter deadline is worth something, but not more than the deadline you actually need.
Coverage. How many lines of the scope the response quotes. This is where the shortest proposal reveals itself.
Track record. Previous work with Scallent, assessed. Not seniority — what went well before.
What the matrix does and doesn't do
The matrix ranks. It doesn't decide.
What it gives is an honest reading of five responses instead of a reading skewed by whichever arrived first or whichever name is most familiar to us. Then there's always context that doesn't fit in a score: the person finishing another project of yours who already knows the brand, the client who has worked with someone and would rather not repeat it, the nuance in the brief that didn't translate into criteria.
That decision is human and remains ours — which is why we own it in front of you instead of sending you five PDFs to choose from.
And for whoever responds
If you're in the pool, this matters to you practically: quote every line you can do, and explicitly switch off the ones you don't.
Switching a line off doesn't take you out of the consultation. Leaving it blank puts your response in the incomplete category, behind all the others — and a good proposal can lose for not having said no to one line.
