Talent diligence is not a management-team assessment

This article is authored by Sumeet Salwan, co-founder, FulcrumQ.

Ask any operating partner whether they do talent diligence, and the answer is almost always yes. Ask whether it produces something concrete, like a scorecard, that goes into the investment committee memo the way commercial, financial and operational diligence do, and the answer changes. The distance between those two answers is not a gap in effort or conviction. It is a gap in the question the industry has inherited.

HR (Pixabay/Representative)

What does talent diligence cover today? A read on the CEO, a view on the CFO, a note on bench strength, perhaps a psychometric, a conversation about culture. Careful work by serious people — and every item on that list answers one question: are these people any good? Rigour there will not settle the question the deal turns on.

Is this organisation talented enough to deliver the thesis?

You can be right about every individual and wrong about the organisation. The CEO impresses, the second line looks deep — and eighteen months on, the new geography is behind, the pricing programme has stalled, and the post-mortem lands on integration complexity. The capability the thesis ran on was never in the frame.

It is an expensive way to learn. Global M&A hit a record $2.8 trillion in the first half of 2026, up 48% year on year, with 47 deals above $10 billion making up nearly half of all value. The failure record has not moved: Harvard Business Review puts M&A failure between 70% and 90%, depending on definition.

Independent research has pointed here for years. Executives in acquired companies leave at more than twice the normal rate — above 20% a year — and the instability runs for a decade. One study matching two decades of deals against 30 million résumés found departures highest not across the workforce but in critical executive, technical, business development and sales roles — the people a thesis runs on. Research in the Journal of Financial Economics finds that closer human-capital fit between merging firms lifts synergy by roughly 42% of the average announcement return. Markets price people. Diligence often does not.

The industry defaults to the individual question for a reason. Asking founders whether the team that built this business can deliver the plan feels like producing a prenup midway through the wedding planning. The discomfort is real, and it comes from making diligence about people. Move the question to the organisation and the register changes: from verdict to joint problem-solving. Most leaders will meet you there, because it is the question they already lie awake on.

Three moves, then, and one discipline.

Start with the value agenda, not the org chart. Every thesis rests on five or six things that must go right — a new geography, a repriced product line, a cost base that must come down without breaking delivery. Write them on one page before opening a single CV. The org chart shows who holds titles; the value agenda shows what has to be done.

Ask where the thesis lands — in three places, not one. On the leadership team: can they deliver this plan, not the last one? On the 20 to 30 roles that carry most of the value-creation plan, many two and three levels down, holding the client relationships, technical judgement and operational reality. And on the two or three functions that must step up, because a thesis built on pricing dies in a weak commercial capability no matter who runs it.

Make it a business conversation, then triangulate. Do not interview people for jobs they are already doing well. Ask what would have to happen for this business to double in value, where the obstacles will come from, which capability they would strengthen first. That exchange tells you more about capability, ambition and blind spots than any competency framework. Then build an evidence mosaic from what you can reach — other diligence streams, employee surveys, customer and supplier feedback, public track records. None of it decisive alone; together it shows a pattern.

And the discipline: Produce the widget. One page naming the value hotspots, the roles that carry them, the gaps, and what closing them will cost — into the memo, and into the price. Talent diligence that yields only a conversation will keep losing to streams that yield a number.

Applied across 100-plus companies over the past decade, the pattern holds: the binding constraint is rarely the person at the top. In a $10 billion healthcare roll-up it was a thin layer of site leaders nobody had flagged; in a global FMCG business, a handful of commercial roles four levels down, in a channel the thesis assumed would simply appear.

This does need a new stream — not an HR appendix, and not a post-close workstream. Talent diligence has to run concurrently with commercial and operational diligence, on the same clock and into the same memo. Sequenced after them, it arrives too late to change the price or the plan. One line sits at the top of it, and everything else answers to it: is this organisation talented enough to deliver the thesis? Second marriages are called a triumph of hope over experience. In dealmaking, the experience is available before the vows — it just has to be written down, and put in the memo.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Sumeet Salwan, co-founder, FulcrumQ.