14th & Co.

Proposal · Candidate Assessment System · via Catalant

For a mid-market industrial products company · consultative sales first, every function next

Hiring is an operating system. Yours doesn't exist yet.

You're shifting your go-to-market toward consultative selling, and the hiring process hasn't caught up. Today the signal comes from ad-hoc interviews, agency referrals, and generic tests with no connection to what the job actually requires. What you're asking for isn't a test — it's a defined picture of what good looks like in your organization, an objective way to measure candidates against it, and a process your own team runs without us. This is how we'd build it.

The operating state

Before & after · the same table we build every engagement around

The cost of ad-hoc hiring shows up late: transactional sellers who interview well, hired into a role that needs discovery discipline and follow-up rigor. The fix isn't a better gut feel — it's a system that makes the evaluation identical no matter who runs it.

Today	After the build
Ad-hoc interviews, judgment varies by interviewer	Structured behavioral guides scored against one benchmark
Generic off-the-shelf tests, no job-specific depth	Role-calibrated assessment modules (20–30 min), built from your own top performers
No definition of what a consultative seller looks like here	A documented performance profile — discovery, follow-up discipline, multi-stakeholder motion — measured as first-class dimensions
Offer decisions made on instinct	Pre-offer probing guides; candidates compared to each other and to the internal benchmark
Process lives in consultants' or agencies' heads	Administered independently by your HR/Ops team across regional business units — handoff is a deliverable, not a slide
Assessment data used once, at hire	Outputs double as development roadmaps for the existing team — the framework pays for itself twice

The system

Three phases · one build · designed for handoff from day one

This is the shape of every engagement we run: a lean client with real operational pain and no bandwidth to build rigor internally, where the deliverable is a system the internal team owns — not a dependency on the consultant.

Phase 1 · Calibrate

Diagnostic & job-profile calibration

We start with your top performers, not a competency library. Structured benchmarking of your best consultative sellers — what they actually do in discovery, follow-up, and multi-stakeholder deals — becomes the scoring baseline.

JD & competency review · sales first, extension functions mapped
Top-performer benchmark · the "what good looks like" baseline
Validation evidence base · benchmarking treated as criterion validation, deliberately

Phase 2 · Instrument

Framework design & testing

Assessment modules, behavioral interview guides, and case scenarios built to separate consultative sellers from feature/benefit sellers — with follow-up discipline as a measured dimension, not an interview vibe.

Assessment modules · 20–30 min each, objectively scored
Benchmark scoring · candidate vs. candidate, candidate vs. internal bar
Pre-offer probing guides · a final structured check before offers go out

Phase 3 · Hand off

Implementation, training & transfer

Designed from day one to be administered by your HR/Ops team across regional business units. Handoff is a deliverable with its own documentation standard — not a slide at the end.

Scoring rubrics & admin guides · run it without us
Interpretation training · leaders and HR coordinators
Development roadmaps · same instruments, existing team

Named now, not discovered later · 01

Sales-methodology content is a co-build.

Our depth is performance calibration, evaluation-system design, and operational build-and-transfer — not a proprietary selling doctrine. We won't arrive with a Challenger or MEDDIC template and rebadge it. The sales-specific competency content gets co-defined in Phase 1 with your VP of Sales and your own top performers — where it should come from anyway, because a framework calibrated to your sellers and your deal motion beats a generic methodology overlay every time.

Named now, not discovered later · 02

A hiring instrument carries legal weight. We build for that.

Any assessment used to gate offer decisions in the US needs to be demonstrably job-related. Most providers gloss this; we design for it. Phase 1's benchmarking is structured as the evidence base for job-relatedness, scoring is documented and auditable, and we build in a review checkpoint with your counsel before the framework formally gates offers. "Objective and scientific" should be a claim you can defend — not a line in a deck.

The extension path

Sales first. The architecture is function-agnostic.

Sales is where the go-to-market shift bites, so it goes first. But the architecture — benchmark, instrument, score, hand off — doesn't care which function it's pointed at. Extending to Engineering, Procurement & Supply Chain, and Customer Service is a calibration exercise on an existing system, not a rebuild. That's what the lightweight-advisory phase is: we stay available as the framework expands, without a standing retainer you don't need.

The proof

The same build, delivered twice · different functions, one shape

Define "what good looks like" from real top performers. Convert it into an objective evaluation system. Make it runnable by non-specialists. Hand it off, documented. We've done this exact build — once for a frontline workforce at national scale, once for a provider network, closed out in public.

Delivered

High-growth EV manufacturer · last-mile delivery · 30+ US markets

Driver profiling, certification & performance framework

A national last-mile launch with no defined profile for a successful driver, no structured hiring evaluation, and no consistent certification standard — scaling 30+ markets at once. We defined the target profile from observed top performers, then built the full evaluation system against it: selection criteria, certification requirements, compliance standards, performance frameworks.

The result

The frameworks became the operating standard across 30+ markets — administered by market-level operations leaders, not a central specialist team, and still governing after handoff.

Delivered · Public record

EverDriven · national student-transportation network · 600+ districts

SP Program 2.0 — provider qualification & governance system

No formal entry standards existed for the provider base — recruiting, renewal, and removal were discretionary. We defined an approved Target Provider Model as the single foundation for those decisions, built the qualification funnel, eligibility and continuation policy with defined thresholds, and the standardized operating framework behind it.

The result

A complete, documented qualification-and-governance system where none existed — handed off with a public program portal, executive closeout, and standards library the client's team operates independently.

everdriven.14thand.co → the delivered record, live

The decision

Engagement structure · fixed scope · no dependency by design

One strategic design phase, then extensions you approve one at a time. Your team running the system independently is the success criterion — not the renewal.

The design phase

Phases 1–3, fixed scope: calibrate against your top performers, build and test the instruments, train your team and hand off the documented system.

The extensions

Engineering, Procurement & Supply Chain, Customer Service — each a discrete, separately approved calibration on the existing architecture. Any order the budget allows.

The advisory

Lightweight, as-needed availability while the framework expands. No open-ended retainer, no standing dependency — by design.

The point

This is not a test vendor. This is an evaluation operating system your team owns on day one.

Stakeholders who sign this — VP of Sales & Marketing, CFO — get the same thing: a defensible, documented standard for who gets hired and why, that keeps working after we leave, and that doubles as the development map for the team you already have.