Use cases
Every day, talent teams use Team Theory to do their most rigorous work in minutes.
Pre-deal
Organizational due diligence
Evaluates a prospective leadership team pre-close and scores them against thousands of prior assessments. People risk gets underwritten with the same rigor as the financials, before the deal closes.
Hiring · Pre-search
Pre-search. Define the seat and the bar before anyone is sourced.
Role definition
Models the role against the traits that predict success in comparable hires. Every search starts from evidence instead of a recycled job description.
Results-based scorecards
A scorecard in minutes, tied to the results the hire must deliver. The panel grades against the same bar, so the decision is consistent and defensible. A CEO scorecard: two hours to fifteen minutes.
Read the deep dive ↓Candidate research and deep dives
Cross-checks the candidate’s story against the public record and flags what doesn’t add up. Before the first conversation, the team knows where to dig.
Hiring · Interview work
Interview work. Run the loop, gather the evidence, make the read.
Interview plans and guides
Each interviewer gets one competency and past-behavior questions a candidate can’t game. No two people cover the same ground. One fund built forty plans as multi-guide sequences.
Reference and back-channel synthesis
Every reference call captured as verbatim evidence by competency, including the off-list calls most searches never make. Ratings roll up across calls so agreement and outliers are visible.
Read the deep dive ↓Leadership assessment
An in-house, evidence-grounded assessment in a day. Write-up time falls by roughly half, and the read pushes back when the evidence says otherwise.
Read the deep dive ↓Hiring · Offer & close
Offer & close. Land the candidate and set them up to win.
Compensation research
Benchmarks a proposed package against live market comps. One customer rates it above the paid benchmarking tool it sits beside.
Closing guidance
Builds the close around the motivators surfaced from the candidate’s own history.
30-60-90 onboarding plans
Written directly from the interview record, so a manager gets on day one the intelligence that usually takes months.
In-seat and performance
Portfolio talent review
Every seat in every company, leadership health over time, benchmarked against the firm’s own bar. Coverage moves from the top few searches to every seat.
Read the deep dive ↓Succession planning
Maps in-house successors to roles based on how they’ve performed. When a seat opens, the firm knows who is next.
Executive performance monitoring
Tracks leadership health across every role, including seats that aren’t open, so problems surface while they are still cheap to fix.
Deep dives
Turn a hiring need into a rigorous interview plan.
One Target. One loop. One bar the whole panel grades against.
The pain today
Scorecards are built from scratch, differently every time.
A CEO scorecard can take two hours, if it gets written at all.
Competencies rarely map to who asks what in the loop.
How Team Theory does it
Builds the Target: mission, three to five measurable twelve-month outcomes, competencies, red flags.
Generates a calibrated interview loop, with formats and depth scaled to the role’s tier.
Maps each competency to an interviewer, with past-behavior questions a candidate can’t game.
Keeps everything reusable, so the next CFO search opens from the last one.
Why it matters
A CEO scorecard drops from two hours to fifteen minutes, at the same rigor.
One bar across the portfolio: searches become comparable, and the hiring standard becomes something the firm owns rather than re-sources.
“Every scorecard I’ve created in the last three months has been through Team Theory. It’s gone from two hours to 15 minutes.”
$17B AUM · 175 portfolio companies
Reference calls that surface the truth.
Calibrated ratings, verbatim evidence, and the off-list calls most searches skip.
The pain today
References are soft, uncalibrated and easy to game.
The hardest signal, from off-list and back-channel calls, rarely gets gathered.
What’s learned on the call dies in someone’s notebook.
How Team Theory does it
Runs a structured reference script: strengths, peak context, development areas, calibrated 1–10 facet ratings.
Guides back-channel and off-list references, the part of a search where a generic model usually breaks down.
Synthesizes every call into a structured summary tied back to the scorecard.
Rolls facet ratings up across every reference, so agreement and outliers are visible at a glance.
Why it matters
References stop being a formality and become decision-grade evidence weighed against the Target.
The back-channel signal that usually decides the hire gets captured, kept and reused on the next search.
An evidence-based read on every candidate.
Behavior over impression. Half the write-up time. A read that pushes back.
The pain today
Assessment defaults to “do I like them” and gut impression.
A full written assessment can take half a day.
Strengths and risks a busy assessor misses go uncaught.
How Team Theory does it
Behavioral assessment against an information-reliability hierarchy: quotes and calibrated data over impressions.
Structured strengths and risks, weakness scoring, and a two-stage decision: qualified, then best fit.
Pushes back, and surfaces strengths and development areas the assessor didn’t think of.
Reruns the analysis with the assessor’s own additions, so the final read stays theirs.
Why it matters
Write-up time falls by roughly half, and assessors report one to two strengths and development areas they had not seen.
Every rating traces to behavioral evidence, so a hiring debate is settled on proof rather than on who spoke last.
“It nails things while adding the evidence rigor to what our guts were telling us.”
$6B AUM · 19 portfolio companies
See and strengthen leadership across the portfolio.
Every seat. Every company. Who is ready now, and who is ready in two years.
The pain today
One talent partner is stretched across thirty or more portfolio companies.
Only about 15% of open leadership roles get proper attention.
“Everyone has the data, but it’s in a million places, so you don’t have it at all.”
How Team Theory does it
A live portfolio talent map: every seat, every company, leadership health over time.
Succession reads across the bench: ready now, or ready in one to two years.
Compounding memory: every scorecard, assessment and review reusable on the next search.
Benchmarks each leader against the bar the firm set, not a generic norm.
Why it matters
Coverage moves from the top few searches to every seat in every company, including the roles that go unwatched.
Leadership risk surfaces early, while there is still time to fix it before exit.
One system, every stage.
Book a walkthrough with our team. In most cases we can begin the same day.