PHASE I

Candidate Selection

• Passionate, tenacious, and positive
• Trainable, adaptable, and innovative
• Dedicated and resilient
• Cooperative and communicative
• Problem Solver

Unless you are beating away Ivy league graduates with a baseball bat, then join the club looking for the diamond in the rough when it comes to talent. As with all of our Cultivation steps, they are designed to be simplified suggestions based on an aggregation of successful input from ongoing collaboration. This is one of the most important steps of the process! Cultivation will not and can not be successful if the process does not start with the correct type of candidate. Similarly, you have probably heard the phrase garbage-in garbage-out... Most interviews are designed to find people that have the knowledge and qualifications that fit the current job openings. That is not the approach that works best for the cultivation environment. Instead, Cultivation is trying to identify the candidates with the appropriate backgrounds, a willingness to learn, enthusiastic about the type of work, and are willing to invest some of their own time in the learning process.

Lets talk about a few examples. In the first example, lets take a retail store hiring a sales clerk. If we have ten candidates, then the candidates that arrive at the interview and already have some knowledge of the store and their products clearly are passionate and tenacious enough to either currently use the products or research them. Second, those that can clearly communicate during the interview process combined with prior examples of dedication to the work the have previously performed (even if it is unrelated to retail) are great starting candidates. Note if you are on the fence about a candidate then take the risk and let them phase themselves out during the third step mission qualification.

Let talk about one more example. In this example, lets take a software company hiring a Java software developer. If we have ten candidates, then we want to start with the candidates that have participated in some sort of Information Technology classes or even better undergraduate degree. However, the candidate does not necessarily have to know Java. The candidates that are writing some software on their own in the evenings tend to be ideal candidates because they are tenacious, passionate, dedicated, and already willing to invest some of their time in learning. Communication skills might be lacking here but they should be sufficient enough to learn and work in a team environment; whereas, in the first example a sales clerk would need more communication skills to start with than say a software engineer.

The examples above are just very high level examples. At the end of the candidate selection process, each organization has to determine the minimum characteristics and qualifications that work for each of their required positions while remembering that the Cultivation process has been designed to train and build most of the require skills using a good starting foundation. Typically, organizations set the starting bar too high and the first sign of this problem are long-running unfilled positions.