Most people who commission a Core Standard report have never seen one before. They know it replaces two rounds of interviews and a written task. They know it takes 48 hours. They know it arrives as a PDF. What they don’t yet know is what’s inside it, and how to read it quickly enough to make a hiring decision on a Monday morning.
So: here is what you get, page by page. The sample we’re walking through is a genuine report, with the candidate’s name, the employer, and the principal details changed. Everything else, the structure, the scoring, the reviewer tone, is exactly what lands in your inbox.
“The report is written to be readable in ten minutes and defensible in a board meeting.”
Page one, the cover
What you’re looking at: the candidate’s name, the role level they were assessed at, the commissioning employer, the date of assessment, and the TCS rating.
The rating is a number on a 0 to 100 benchmark. It is not a percentage score of the assessment, it is a calibrated position against the population of EAs we’ve assessed at the same level. A rating of 72 at Executive Assistant level means the candidate sits in the 72nd percentile of EAs we’ve seen for that role. A rating of 88 means top decile.
We designed the cover to be the one page a busy hiring manager can screenshot, paste into a Slack thread, and have the rest of the team understand. Everything else in the report exists to substantiate that number.
Page two, the pillar breakdown
What you’re looking at: five scores, one per pillar, Prioritisation, Judgement, Communication, Execution, Partnership, each on the same 0 to 100 benchmark.
This is the page hiring managers spend the longest on, and the one that most often changes how they feel about a candidate. A headline rating of 75 can mean any number of different things underneath. An EA with 85 / 70 / 80 / 65 / 75 is a different hire from one with 70 / 80 / 70 / 80 / 75, both land at 75 overall, but the first is a strong strategic thinker whose follow-through needs management, and the second is a reliable delivery machine who will occasionally miss what a brief is really asking for.
The shape matters as much as the average. We write the pillar scores as a bar chart, not a table, because the visual shape is the insight. A candidate with four tight scores and one outlier tells you where to probe in a final conversation. A candidate with five flat, middling scores is often a safer hire than their headline suggests. A candidate with one 90 and one 55 is a specialist, brilliant in the right role, a bad fit in most others.
Page three, the scenario modules
What you’re looking at: a summary of each module the candidate sat, what it tested, and how they performed.
Every assessment is made up of a sequence of scenario modules, six at entry level and up to eight at senior level, run end-to-end inside a session clock that runs from 60 to 90 minutes depending on the level. The modules aren’t abstract personality tasks, they’re the kind of day an EA would have on their third Wednesday in role. A complex inbox to triage. A calendar to rebuild after a last-minute senior meeting moves. A written brief to produce under time pressure. A tricky internal email to draft. A conflicting request from two stakeholders. A quiet ambiguity planted in the brief, to see whether the candidate catches it. At Levels 2 and 3, an AI fluency probe. At Level 3, a short data-interpretation task.
On page three, we tell you what each module tested, what the candidate produced and, in one short sentence per module, the reviewer’s read. You can see where the candidate was strongest, where they stumbled, and which pillars each module was weighted toward. For hiring managers who like to dig into the detail, this is the page. For everyone else, it’s fine to skim.
Page four, the reviewer note
What you’re looking at: roughly 300 to 400 words of written commentary from the expert who reviewed the candidate’s work.
This is the most read page in the report, and the one we spend the longest on. Every Core Standard assessment is reviewed by a practising EA or EA manager, not scored by a model, not graded by a general-purpose assessor. The reviewer writes in plain English about how the candidate actually operated, what surprised them, and what they’d want to probe in a final interview.
We hold the reviewer note to a deliberately high standard. It should read like a note a senior colleague has just sent you after sitting in on a working day with the candidate. It should be specific. It should resist both hype and hedging. It should be something a hiring manager could defensibly read aloud in a pay conversation six months later without wishing they’d worded it differently.
If the reviewer saw something that didn’t make the pillar scores, a flash of unusual judgement, a moment of escalation handling, a small piece of phrasing that revealed a disposition, this is where they’ll say so.
Page five, red flags and standouts
What you’re looking at: the qualitative edges. The two or three things worth flagging, and the two or three things worth protecting.
A good rubric captures most of what matters, but not all of it. Some candidates do one thing in the assessment that is genuinely exceptional and one thing that is genuinely concerning, and neither is the sort of signal that moves a pillar score by more than a point or two. Page five is where those edges live.
A standout might read: “Candidate proactively flagged an inconsistency between the principal’s calendar and the stated brief, which had not been caught by two previous reviewers. This is unusual behaviour at this level.” A red flag might read: “In the stakeholder conflict module, the candidate’s tone toward the finance counterparty was noticeably sharper than toward the investor. Worth probing whether this pattern generalises.”
We keep this page short on purpose. Three items or fewer on each side. The goal is signal, not exhaustiveness.
Page six, the recommendation
What you’re looking at: the expert’s read on fit, with a suggested next step.
The recommendation is the most opinionated page in the report. It takes the rating, the pillar shape, the module performance, the reviewer note and the flags, and synthesises them into a single read. The options are structured: strong hire at this level, hire with development plan, hire at lower level, not a fit at this level, or inconclusive, recommend a follow-up task.
We resist the pressure to give every candidate a confident thumbs-up. Assessments that read like a blanket endorsement aren’t useful to a hiring manager, they’re the reason CV-plus-interview failed in the first place. A TCS recommendation earns its credibility by being willing to say, in writing, “this candidate isn’t ready for this remit yet, but would be an exceptional hire at one level below.”
We also tell you what to do next. If the candidate is a strong hire, we suggest the one probe question we’d still ask in a final conversation. If they’re a hire with a development plan, we lay out the first 90 days of support that would let them close the gap. If they’re not a fit, we say so and explain why.
How to use the report in a real hiring decision
The report is written to be readable in ten minutes and defensible in a board meeting. Most hiring managers we work with develop a ritual: glance at the cover, study page two, skim page three, read page four in full, read page five twice, and close with page six. That’s twelve minutes, and it replaces a second-round interview plus a written task plus the internal debate that would have followed both.
If you’re running several candidates in parallel, the rating and pillar shape are designed to be directly comparable. You can lay five reports side by side and the differences become obvious. A 78 with 82 / 78 / 74 / 78 is a stronger candidate for a senior EA role than an 81 with 90 / 70 / 85 / 79, the first is balanced and the second has a weakness exactly where the role lives. That is the kind of trade-off the rating alone won’t surface, and the pillar page will.
Finally, the reviewer note and the flags are designed to feed straight into a final interview, not compete with it. Our best hiring managers treat the report as the replacement for the competency-heavy middle rounds, and use the 45 minutes they saved to have one crisp, tailored final conversation. The probe questions on page six are the starter kit for that conversation.
Download the full sample report
The walk-through above describes the structure. If you want to see the real thing, here is the anonymised sample report we share with prospective clients. Everything we’ve described above is in there, built around a fictional candidate at EA to Senior Leadership level.
Commission a Core Standard assessment
Expert-reviewed. 48-hour turnaround. The same report structure for every level of EA we assess. Employer pricing from £495 +VAT.
See EA Hire pricing →For candidates reading this
If you are an EA considering sitting the assessment yourself, the report you receive through TCS Certified has the same structure. The cover carries your rating. Page two has your pillar scores. Pages three, four and five are written by the same experts, in the same tone, with the same rigour. The only difference is the recommendation, your version is written for you, with development prompts against whichever pillars have the most room, and a short section on how to position the result to an employer.
Many senior EAs in our network sit the assessment annually. They treat it the way a coach treats a fitness test, a measured baseline they can work against. It is also the cleanest way we know for a senior EA to signal seriousness to the market. A TCS rating on a CV shortcuts roughly two rounds of interview for the roles it is being sent into.
If you have not yet read the methodology behind the five pillars, it is worth your time: What separates a great EA from an average one. The pillars are what you are being scored against, and the piece breaks each one down with the behaviours that distinguish top-decile from average.
Whether you are hiring an EA or sitting the assessment yourself.
If you are hiring, commission the assessment for your shortlist. If you are an EA, sit it yourself and keep the report. Both go through the same scenario, are scored against the same rubric, and are expert-reviewed by the same team.
The Core Standard is a scenario-based assessment for Executive Assistants, Private PAs, and Chief of Staff hires. Every report is structured the same way: cover, pillar breakdown, module summary, reviewer note, flags, recommendation. Employer pricing from £495 +VAT. TCS Certified for candidates £175 inc. VAT.