Aside from showing my age, what does it mean to have been running Operating Partner searches for 20 years? I guess it depends upon the person that you might ask. My kids would have one answer, my colleagues would have another. Hopefully my clients would have one consistent answer.

One thing I do know is that as time has gone by, certain patterns related to talent assessment have emerged. I don’t pretend to be an industrial psychologist, but I do feel like I know a good Operating Partner candidate when I see one. I suppose when you’ve interviewed enough people, seen enough failures and successes, and served enough satisfied clients, there are some things that you just end up trusting about your judgment. But what good does that do anyone if it’s simply locked up in my head? At some point, it needs to be more transportable for the benefit of everyone around this search process.

So, as I moved into 2026, I was committed to making this a year of transformation for my practice. What excuses did I have left? AI has given me a synthesis capability that simply was not available last year. I’ll be damned if I didn’t try to take full advantage of it.

The result, folks, is what I’m calling the Conti Confidence Score™.

(Please excuse the self-indulgence, but time served equates to taking a few liberties here and there.)

Executive assessment has had an authenticity problem for a long time. A senior candidate walks into your process with a resume shaped by a professional writer, answers refined across a dozen prior interviews, and references selected because they will confirm the story. What you meet in your conference room is basically a presentation layer. Twenty years of placing portfolio operations executives has shown me how far that layer can drift from the actual capabilities underneath. Some of the best hires I’ve been part of interviewed unevenly, and I’ve watched polished, well-rehearsed candidates consume years of a hold period while delivering little to no impact.

Last month I wrote about asking Operating Partners how their firms establish that the portfolio ops team caused the outcomes it claims, i.e. “Show Your Work.” The same evidence problem lives inside hiring. A firm that struggles to verify what its own team created will have an even harder time verifying what a stranger across the table created somewhere else, years ago, at a company that no longer exists.

Over the past 8 months, I codified the Conti Confidence Score, a structured assessment instrument for portfolio operations candidates. It scores a candidate across ten weighted dimensions of demonstrated capability, from value creation track record through exit contribution to the quality of sponsor-side references, and produces a single normalized score. Picture a 50-box rubric that ebbs and flows based upon the data we can collect during a search process. The weights against their achievements come from pattern data — 250+ completed portfolio operations placements across more than 100 PE firms — which profiles succeeded, which failed, and what the evidence looked like at the point of hire in each case.

I ran it in beta through the second quarter of 2026 with a group of existing clients on live searches. They consumed it, challenged it and I tweaked the output. And the instrument improved because of them. Several dimensions were rebuilt during that cycle to strip out scoring drift toward organizational context (when it was tough to determine an individual’s impact versus an organizational lift), i.e. the credit a candidate gets for the org chart they happened to occupy rather than anything they did inside it.

What the CCS refuses to score matters as much as what it measures. Pedigree adds nothing. A Harvard MBA with a decade at McKinsey scores a 2 on value creation track record if they can’t name detailed EBITDA improvements they personally drove. Presentation quality adds nothing either. Sophisticated candidates have learned to present in a way that sounds like a 4 when the underlying evidence, once probed, is a 2, and the framework flags that failure mode by design. The confident candidate with no specifics scores the same as the quiet one with no specifics.

You should know my stake in this. Lancor sells retained search, and the CCS is a commercial asset of that practice. I built it because PE clients crave data and substantiation. Headhunters need to defend their conviction on candidates with something firmer than instinct. Publishing the scoring holds us to a higher standard than keeping it in my head, and it gives every client a way to interrogate judgment instead of taking it on faith.

The full methodology now lives for top level review on The Operating Partner, including the ten dimensions and the four hiring biases the instrument was designed to resist. Clients in active engagements receive the complete weighting rationale, dimension by dimension.

If you’re building or hiring a portfolio operations team and you want to see how we score the operator underneath the presentation, the page is up, and I’d welcome your thoughts.

https://operatingpartner.com/the-conti-confidence-score