Better Hiring, Higher Retention, Stronger ExecutionClient Case Study
Situation
This lower middle-market private equity firm focused on industrial and automotive Manufacturing across North America & Europe. Their portfolio companies had complex, operationally intensive footprints. To meet growth targets, they wanted to aligning leadership capability to strategy execution demands.
Complications
The private equity Director knew its value creation plans wouldn’t succeed without the right leaders in place—especially at the executive and operational levels where leadership execution risk tends to hide. Yet traditional methods — interviews, resumes, reference calls — couldn’t predict who would actually lead under pressure.
Their founding partners had experience with behavioral assessments, but needed a solution built for scale, speed, and depth. They turned to our leadership simulation assessments to strengthen hiring and promotion decisions across both portfolio companies and their internal team. They knew talent decisions in PE-backed companies couldn’t be left to gut feel. They needed real data on whether someone could actually lead in a plant or a dynamic ops environment.
Approach: Making Talent a Competitive Edge for Private Equity
We delivered highly targeted simulation-based assessments that mirrored the real-world scenarios faced by their leaders — conflict, ambiguity, change management — allowing operating partners to assess how candidates actually behave under pressure. Their implementation included:
Results: Better Hiring, Higher Retention, and Stronger Execution
By replacing their unstructured interviews with behavior-based data, the Private Equity firm was able to surface both red flags and high-potential leaders early — often before day one on the job. The assessments are being used as a roadmap that identifies where to support a new leader and where they may face friction.
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