Add-on . Fit overlay Coming Soon
Two short questionnaires, paired by a named TCS expert, delivered as a four-page supplement to your Core Standard report.
Capability is only half the hire. The wrong working-style match doesn't show up at interview. It surfaces at month nine: missed signals, mounting principal frustration, the candidate discreetly looking, and a handover before year one is out. TCS Match is the optional overlay that prevents that, by reading the working-style fit across six dimensions before you offer.
What you receive
Launching soon as an add-on to any Core Standard capability assessment. Indicative price £350 +VAT, confirmed at launch. Register your interest and we’ll tell you the week it opens.
For context: a mis-hire costs far more than the salary: the recruitment fee, the onboarding, the principal’s time spent re-recruiting, and the working momentum lost in the gap. £350 is a fraction of that.
Built by Lily Shippen from thirteen years of placing Executive Assistants.
Who TCS Match is for
Some hires you can make on capability alone. TCS Match is not built for those. It is built for the hires where the working relationship is unusually close, the visibility into the principal's life is unusually high, and the intended tenure is years rather than months. Get the fit wrong on these and a candidate who passed every interview, scored cleanly on capability, and looked right on paper still leaves before they have paid back the cost of hiring them.
We do not recommend TCS Match as a standalone. Without the capability data underneath, it is a social compatibility check, not a hiring signal. Used with the capability assessment, it becomes the second layer that turns a strong hire into a durable one.
Where it earns its keep
Diary, inbox, travel, drafting in one voice for years. The closer the working relationship, the higher the cost of a mismatch. The faster a mismatch shows up.
Where it earns its keep
Family logistics, principal preferences, household-staff dynamics. The PA sees more of the family than most relatives. Fit isn't a soft concern. It is the role.
Where it earns its keep
Side-by-side with a founder for years, not a quarter. Compatibility is the difference between a partnership that compounds and a churn that resets every eighteen months.
How TCS Match works
01
Twenty minutes, sixty questions, alongside the Core Standard. Covers preferred pace, feedback rhythm, decision approach, communication register, autonomy needs, and structure preference. Calibrated to the principal-EA dynamic specifically, not a generic personality framework.
02
Ten minutes, completed by the hiring principal or their proxy (often an existing EA or COO). Asks about the operating environment rather than self-perception: how fast is the day, how directive is the comms, how much visibility do they want? That data moves the outcome. Self-rating doesn't.
03
A reviewer pairs the two questionnaires across the six dimensions. Some reward closeness (pace, register), others reward complementarity (decision style, structure). The reviewer names where the fit is tight, where it's complementary, and where it deserves a final-stage conversation before offer.
04
A four-page supplement to the Core Standard employer report. Compatibility score, dimension-by-dimension read, the conversations worth having before offer, and an onboarding note for the first ninety days. Delivered in the same 48-hour window as the capability report.
What TCS Match maps
How fast the principal operates versus how fast the candidate is comfortable operating. Closeness rewarded.
Mismatch surfaces at week three. A fast principal experiences a careful candidate as slow. A careful principal experiences a fast candidate as reckless.
Formal, direct, warm, or terse. The candidate has to write in the principal's voice. Closeness rewarded.
Mismatch surfaces in the first sent email. The fastest signal a hire isn't working.
Evidence-led versus instinct-led. Often complementarity rewarded: an instinct-led principal benefits from an evidence-led second brain, and vice versa.
Mismatch shows up as friction in approval cycles. The principal asks for a recommendation and gets a deck, or asks for analysis and gets a hunch.
How direct, how frequent, how public. Mismatch here wears on the relationship fastest.
Mismatch shows up as feedback that lands as criticism, or doesn't land at all. The most common cause of a candidate quietly opening LinkedIn at month nine.
Tightly structured days or emergent. Often complementarity rewarded: a highly emergent principal benefits from a structured counterpart.
Mismatch shows up as a structured principal who feels chaotic, or an emergent principal who feels micromanaged.
How much visibility the principal wants versus how much autonomy the candidate needs to do good work. The single biggest driver of tenure.
Mismatch shows up as a principal who feels out of the loop, or a candidate who feels watched. Either way, the relationship doesn't last.
What lands in your inbox
Four pages. Delivered in the same 48-hour window as your Core Standard report. Reviewed and signed off by a named TCS expert. Here's what's on each page.
A headline compatibility band ('strong fit', 'complementary', 'watch out for'), a three-line top summary, and a colour-coded snapshot across all six dimensions. The page a hiring principal can absorb in thirty seconds.
One tile per dimension. Each names the principal's profile, the candidate's profile, the compatibility read (closeness or complementarity), the reviewer's note, and the onboarding move. Sample below.
Pace . Communication register . Decision style . Feedback preferences . Structure preference . Autonomy tolerance.
The two or three dimensions that deserve a final-stage conversation. Specific questions to ask the candidate, specific things to listen for. So you walk into final-stage with a sharper read.
Sample question:
"Tell me about a time the principal you supported gave you feedback you found difficult to hear. What did they do that landed, and what would you wish they had done differently?"
A short note for the principal and the new hire. What to set up in week one. What to revisit at month one. What to expect by month three. The piece that turns the assessment into a working partnership.
Sample dimension tile
Drawn from an anonymised composite report.
Dimension 1 of 6
Pace.
Read
Complementary · tight
Principal
Works in half-day sprints. Reactive to client momentum. Decisions in minutes, not days.
Candidate
Fast under pressure, but builds in 30-minute consideration windows on the highest-stakes calls.
Reviewer note
The candidate is fast enough to keep up but adds enough rigour to slow the highest-stakes calls. The combination should compound. Watch out for high-pressure deal weeks where the principal will move faster than the candidate finds comfortable.
Onboarding move
Agree a "stop, slow, ship" three-light framework in week one so the candidate knows when the half-day sprint is non-negotiable.
Want to see a full anonymised supplement before you commit? Email us and we'll send one over.
When to add TCS Match
Not every hire needs TCS Match. For a short-tenure contract EA, a household PA on a rota, or a Chief of Staff on a defined 12-month project, the capability assessment is usually enough. Where TCS Match earns its place is the close-quarters, long-tenure hire where capability and fit are both load-bearing.
Add Match
Skip Match
Unsure? Email us with the role and we'll tell you straight.
£350 +VAT add-on per candidate · indicative, confirmed at launch
We’re finalising the overlay now. Register your interest and we’ll send your booking link the week TCS Match opens, and you’ll be able to add it at commission, or retrospectively within 14 days of your Core Standard report.
Commonly asked
No. Those are general-purpose frameworks built for organisational psychology at scale. TCS Match is built specifically for the principal-EA, principal-PA, and CEO-CoS dynamic, where the working compatibility questions are sharper and the stakes are different. We do not generate a personality type. We generate a compatibility read against the seat you are hiring for.
The dimensions are built on Lily Shippen's thirteen years of placing Executive Assistants. They are validated against the patterns that distinguish long-tenure principal-EA partnerships from those that quietly end inside a year.
The principal questionnaire is ten minutes, mobile-friendly, and can be delegated. Most clients have an existing EA, COO, or trusted senior team member complete it on the principal's behalf, since the questions describe the operating environment rather than self-perception. We can also conduct it as a 15-minute call if that works better for the principal.
No. The principal sees only the compatibility overlay and the actionable commentary. Candidate questionnaire raw responses are confidential to the reviewer. Candidates who sit TCS Match as part of an employer-commissioned assessment are told this up front.
Use it as a conversation starter, not a scorecard. The overlay names which dimensions deserve a final-stage conversation before offer. Treat a strong score as confirming a decision you were already leaning toward. Treat a weak score as a prompt for a deeper conversation, not a veto. The point is not to rule a candidate out. It is to know what to look for in onboarding.
Not directly. TCS Match maps candidate-to-principal compatibility and requires both sides to complete a questionnaire. Candidates using TCS Certified can add a working-style self-profile when it launches. Until then, email us to arrange.
Especially useful for senior EA, Executive Business Partner, family office, and Chief of Staff hires. Register your interest and we’ll let you know the moment it’s live.