The Science of Success: Dr. Ryne Sherman on Understanding Human Potential

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Dr. Ryan Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments. They pioneered personality assessments to improve workplace performance and have assessed over 11 million people worldwide. They focus on using data-driven insights to help organizations succeed and are committed to diversity and inclusion. Under Ryan’s leadership, the team continues to build on their strong reputation delivering talent management solutions and driving industry innovation. Ryan earned his PhD in psychology from the University of California Riverside and previously served as an associate professor at Texas Tech University and Florida Atlantic University. He brings a passion for advancing scientific research and his background in academia has been key to Hogan’s success. Awards and recognition for Ryan and the organization highlight their dedication to progress and excellence.

He is also the co-host of the Science of Personality podcast which explores the topics of personality, leadership, and organizational effectiveness with a new episode every two weeks. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessments, Ryne Sherman. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Ryne Sherman: Well, thanks for having me, Anthony. Really pleasure to be here.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay, Ryan. So tell us simply in your own words, what exactly does Hogan Assessments do? Sure.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, so Hogan Assessments really helps organizations solve two critical problems around talent issues. The first is how to find the right talent, how to identify the right talent for the right role in those positions because we’re all different in a variety of ways and every role calls for different kinds of skills, a different kind of knowledge. And so helping organizations identify who’s the right person for that job.

That’s one step of what we would call a talent identification or selection. The other thing that we help organizations do is develop their current talent on the inside, typically in the level of leadership kind of role. So we know leadership is absolutely critical to organizational success. Leaders have more impact on the organization’s outcome than anybody else. So developing those leaders to have the right skill set to be more effective in the organization is essential and we help organizations do that.

And we do both of those things through the use of scientifically validated personality assessments, which help us sort of understand what makes you tick, what drives you, what do you skill that, what areas might you struggle in that you need a little more help and development around. And that’s the essentially what we do at Hogan.

Anthony Codispoti: So you’ve got clients who come to you and say, listen, we’ve got a whole bunch of hiring needs. We want your help in evaluating some of the prospects that we’re looking at. Are the assessments that you’re using roughly the same at the core, regardless of what the industry is that you’re assisting?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, it’s a great question, Anthony. I really like that because actually not a lot of people assess that kind of stuff. But yes, in fact, that’s one of the sort of the beauties of our business is that once you sort of understand the entire personality landscape, that’s kind of all there is you need to know. Once you’ve assessed all of those individual qualities and and I take a lot of pride in the fact that our assessments really are comprehensive in their nature. Some people will tell you our assessments take a long time. Some people will tell you our reports are really extensive and they’re really long. And there’s so many scales and so many sub scales. And that’s that’s true. That’s because personality is pretty complex.

We’re all very different from each other in lots of different ways. Our assessments grab all of that information. But the good news is once you have that information, there’s really three core assessments.

One of those we call measures the insights, your values, your motives, what drives you. Another one we call your bright side. That’s that’s you when you’re being your best. That’s you putting your best foot forward. That’s the you that most people get to know right away when they first meet you. And then the last one is our dark side assessment. This is the one that gets the you that’s sort of there all the long but doesn’t always show up.

It sort of shows up when you’re under stress or when you’re unable to sort of manage your the impression that you’re making upon others. And once we have those three pieces of information, we can really fit that with any job, any role. In fact, we have done that we have data on every single job in the US economy, most jobs in the global economy. So once we have that core piece of personality information, we can really understand that for any kind of job. So that’s the beauty of our of our suite of assessments is that we can give the same set of assessments and answer many different questions.

Anthony Codispoti: So thinking about those three categories, what drives you bright side, dark side? It’s interesting in terms of like the structure and how you think about that. What drives you I can sort of conceptualize like questions that would help help to get at that. Bright side, I get that. That’s like the version of me that you’re getting right now, right? Like you’re meeting me for the first time, I’m hosting a podcast here. And I can see how you would get questions that would kind of bring that out. But the dark side, that one confuses me a little bit because I’m still, I get that you want to see how I am under pressure or under stress. But how do you flesh that out during a personality assessment? Because I’m in a relaxed controlled environment, you know, I’m not having my buttons pushed in at that time.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, the really interesting thing, and you’re making a really good point there, Anthony, is it might seem like, well, wait a minute, if I’m, you know, taking this assessment, how is this really getting at how I’m going to respond when I’m either too comfortable in a role or even there are a lot of pressure in a role. And the answer is that it turns out that many of the things that we think are our strengths can be weaknesses at certain times.

That’s really the way that assessment works is a lot of times people will be telling us things like, yes, I can overcome any challenge. There’s nothing that can stand in my way. I’m unstoppable if I just put my mind to it. And it turns out that while that can be or that that sort of confidence can be a great strength, sometimes that leads to overconfidence. And we can overdo that thing, we can take on more than we can really handle, we can feel entitled to good results, even if those aren’t coming our way, even if we fail to perform.

And that assessment’s able to pick up on those kinds of things, just going too far in that direction. That’s the funny thing about personality, Anthony, is that and when I first got into studying personality psychology, I found out that the technical term is egocinthenic, right, which basically means we tend to like ourselves. So what we tend to think of as our great strengths, we don’t think of as weaknesses. So sort of surprising or maybe unsurprisingly in some ways, people are willing to sort of admit those weaknesses, partly because they think that’s what their strengths are.

Anthony Codispoti: They don’t actually realize that they’re raising their hand to point out a weakness. They’re really pushing hard on what they think is their strength. And because of the work that you’ve done to understand the patterns of human personality and human behavior, you know that there’s a tendency when somebody is pushing too hard on this being a strength that there’s another side to that same coin. Absolutely.

And then you guys also, you do a lot of work in helping folks develop their current team. It seems like that would be kind of a different set of skills than sort of assessing personality. Like you want, let’s sort of assess where you are. Now that we know where you are and where you need work, now we’re going to help you. What does this other side of the business look like?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, it’s, it is a challenge in some respects, because as I just mentioned, personality is kind of egocentronics, we tend to like ourselves. So even if we get feedback that, hey, this might be a weakness for you, this might be an area where you want to be on the watch out for that. Many of us tend to go, yeah, but I really think that’s what makes me great.

And so I’m going to keep doing that kind of thing. This is where, you know, getting that feedback is sort of a critical start. We’re just, we find in our research that sometimes just giving people awareness of how this might cause you to be seen, right? This may have an impact on your reputation. And just getting that awareness of how those behaviors might affect your reputation, sometimes is enough for people to go, ooh, I do need to watch out for that. I better back off in this particular situation, or maybe I need to trust people a little bit more.

I’m too quick to dismiss other people or to keep people at a distance. Sometimes just that awareness is enough. But sometimes that’s not, sometimes you need even more expertise and advice. And that’s where coaching really comes into play. Now, at Hogan, we do some coaching, but that’s really not our core competency. Our core competency really is the personality assessment. But we partner with thousands of coaches all over the world who have been certified in our assessments. It can use our assessments as part of their coaching practice. And there are many amazing, excellent executive coaches who have dozens, 20, 30, some even 40 years of coaching experience under their belts. And they can take that experience, combine it with the insights that come from our assessments and really create custom crafted development plans for individuals to say, hey, these are the things we want you to work on it.

Next week, I want you to tell me about what steps you took, what are the things you did this week behaviorally to try to work on that particular aspect of your reputation. And they can really go a long ways in the workplace. I mean, we’re typically talking about working with leaders who are right on that next level of getting into the C-suite. That’s a pretty typical sweet spot for us. They want to get to that C-suite and they’re just, you’re just that close.

The company thinks they’re great. And that’s really a critical thing. I think a lot of people think if you get coaching, that must mean there’s something bad, that there’s something wrong. Well, first of all, every professional athlete has coaching, right? I mean, like, I mean, coaching is about getting better. It doesn’t matter how good you are, right?

They’re obviously all great. So that’s typically the level that we’re working at. It’s people who are really great and have been fantastic and have been promoted all the way up through their careers and are on that next level of getting to the C-suite. And with just the right coach, the right rounding out, the right strategies, they can get themselves to where they want to get to in their careers. And so that’s really, and let me say one other thing about that sort of coaching, Anthony. I think a lot of people think, oh, so your goal is to get somebody to change their personality.

That’s not really our goal. In fact, I’m not even sure what that means to change your personality. I, you know, there’s a number of ways we can think about personality and certain biological parts of our personality really don’t change that much anyway. The goal isn’t to change your personality.

The goal is to sort of understand the way you typically want to operate and understand how that might cause you issues in certain times and when you might want to back off on that, when you might want to change your tact or change your strategy.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s interesting. And do, do all of your reports and your assessments come from, I’m probably going to use the wrong term, I think of it as sort of an asynchronous communication. I am taking this assessment, this test, I’m sitting down and I’m filling out a bubble sheet. You guys are taking that and reviewing that separately. Or do any of the assessments come from like observational things? Like if there’s a salesperson who wants to sort of improve and become a sales manager, you might sit in on some of their sessions, something like that.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah. Yeah. And I think both of those are really, you know, those are, those are good examples of the kinds of assessments that are sort of out there. There’s actually many methods for evaluating talent. And those, those are two really popular ones. The one is sort of the sell what we call self report, personality assessment where you know, like you said, bubble sheets, that’s the classic way of doing it. We don’t do those anymore. It’s all now it’s bubbles on the internet or in fact, with your phones now we have a way of doing it where you just click an area on the phone.

Anthony Codispoti: Are you saying I just dated myself?

Ryne Sherman: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, I, I’m certainly very familiar with bubble sheets myself. So, so, you know, that method is the way that we use it is that sort of that sort of a self report bubble sheet kind of method. Of course, behavioral observation is another method as well. When I would say is why and again, I’m sure people would say I’m biased and for some reasons, but I think I’m biased by the data. What I find is that if I could spend 15 minutes with you or 30 minutes with you or 45 minutes with you and to try to get as much information as possible as many insights as I can, that that’s the most efficient method for getting that and believe me, I’ve looked, I’ve looked at all kinds of things like let’s scrape your social media history, let’s look at all kinds of other ways that I can get insights about you with your text messaging, the words you use, let’s put little cameras on it. We’ve done that. I mean, I’ve done studies where we put cameras on people to watch where they walked and where they went and those kinds of things and and what we found is that the most efficient method for getting the most insight out of an individual is to use those those self report techniques.

Interesting. There’s nothing wrong necessarily with these sort of behavioral kinds of things and in fact, there are really like you use an example there with the sales circumstance where yes, getting feedback on a specific situation, a specific account can be really valuable for individuals. So I’m not trying to dismiss those, but in terms of a sort of a broad overview of how you’re going to tend to behave across many situations, the self report personality assessment just tends to be the most efficient. And like I said, I know some people will say, geez, 30 minutes, 45 minutes of test taking, that’s a long time. It is, but it’s sort of like, but is it worth it? That’s the question. And in my view, it really is worth it.

Anthony Codispoti: And I’m not even sure if this is sort of a valid question, because I don’t know if people are trying to do like, do people try to gain the assessment? Like, I know I’m not a really good leader, but I’m going to try to give them the answers to show that I am a good leader, because that’s the job that I want.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, it’s another good question. This is one that we do get quite a bit, but the way people typically ask is there’s a tire topic in academia on faking. It’s what’s called faking. Oh, do people try to fake? Do they try to say, Oh, this isn’t how I am really, but this is and there’s a couple of parts to that question.

It gets very confusing very quickly. On the one hand, I’m not sure what it means to fake, right? You could say, Well, it means to say something that you don’t really feel you don’t really think. But here’s the thing, ever since you were really little, you’ve been coached to fake, right? Think about an infant. What does an infant does an infant fake is an infant being its true self, or is an infant, you know, trying to impress someone? Well, infants, they just do what they do, right? But from the moment you’re born, there’s somebody telling you, Don’t do this, do this, do this, do that. And that happens for your entire life. This is an entire socialization process. So we’ve all been socialized to behave in certain ways. I mean, the example I use all the time with people is, Well, you know, Anthony, you’re wearing a shirt here today. I know, why did you decide to do that? I mean, are you trying to make some sort of impression on people by wearing clothes? I mean, why, you know, why didn’t you just be your true self?

Anthony Codispoti: Trying not to get people sick while they’re eating their lunch.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah. So I mean, the point is that we’re always doing little things to manage our impression. In fact, that happens when people take personality assessments, that happens when people go on job interviews, that happens when people create resumes, right?

So we’re always trying to create some kind of impression. What we found with our research is the impressions, when people take our assessments, we don’t think it’s not like a blood test. We’re not measuring some true personality inside you. What we’re measuring is the impression you’re trying to make, right?

So what’s the impression? What are you trying to tell us about yourself? And what we do with our assessments is we link that to other data. So we link that to performance on the job, we link that to reputation on the job. And we say people who try to do the things you’re telling us that you do, this is how they’re seen. This is how they tend to perform on the job. So in many respects, you could say, well, you know, do people try to gain the system or do it?

Well, I think they do. I think people try to do that just in the same way you would do that on a job interview, just in the same way you would do that on a resume, you’re going to try to make it look as good as possible. But our assessments are designed with that in mind. They’re designed thinking that people are trying to put forward the best impression that they can. So it’s not about trying to catch people who are faking or anything like that. I will say that we have a few examples of people who this was run really nice study.

I think it’s okay to say at this point, it’s about 20 years old now. After 9-11, we had a contract with the US government to hire all the TSA employees. And so all of these employees who are going to hire had to take our assessments.

And, you know, thousands and thousands of people across the US taking our assessments. By the way, we don’t have that contract anymore, and we haven’t for a long time. So if you’re wondering about today’s TSA employees, don’t ask us.

Anthony Codispoti: If you are now upset with the TSA agents, don’t blame Hogan assessments.

Ryne Sherman: But the federal government requires that if someone doesn’t get a job, you have to tell them why they didn’t get the job. And they were allowed to reapply for that job six months later. So in this particular study, we had about 5,000 people who were denied employment for the TSA job.

They were denied specifically because they didn’t meet the profile for that job on our assessments. And they were allowed to take it again six months later. These 5,000 people did. Now, if there was ever anybody motivated, I mean, they were told specifically, you didn’t get the job because of your scores on this assessment. If there was ever anybody motivated to try to fake to get a different score, what we found was that about 5% of those people got different scores. 2.5% were a better fit for the job, 2.5% were a worse fit for the job. So it doesn’t really seem like there’s a lot of the

Anthony Codispoti: impression that we tried to make. 95% pretty much scored the same. Yeah, pretty much the same thing, pretty much the same fit. So this question of faking, and there’s a huge academic literature on it, is it very… The question is this, if you give somebody a personality test and then you say, okay, now take it again, but pretend like you’re somebody else, people can get different scores. That’s absolutely the case. I mean, I tell people all the time, if you want to get different scores on a personality test, it’s easy, just mark different answers, you’ll get a different score.

But what’s the goal? Again, that’s what I mean when I say it’s not a blood test. If I want to get a different score on a blood test, I can’t just

Ryne Sherman: think my way to a different score on a blood test.

Anthony Codispoti: What sets you and Hogan assessments apart from other types of assessments out there?

Ryne Sherman: Well, I think what people would say, and I think it’s true, is that we’re grounded in science. So the founders of our company, Drs. Robert and Joyce Hogan, both academics, Robert Hogan is one of the most famous personality psychologists of all time. He’s still alive, by the way. He’s 87 years old, I think now.

And so we’re still chat every week. But everything behind our assessment starts with science. It starts with science at the core. I’m a lucky guy of a big research team of PhDs and masters. I owe psychologists, personality psychologists, quantitative psychologists, who work on my team, and make sure our science is the latest, the best science we can offer on any day. We make updates to our assessments, we make updates to our norms constantly, at no real value to us. Like, none of our clients say, geez, Hogan, we would use you if you would update your norms or geez, Hogan, we would use you if you’re like, we just do it because we know it’s better. Like, we just know that it improves our assessments and it’s going to make them better. And so even though it doesn’t make us any money, we’re just that’s just what we’re committed to. We are committed to making sure that whatever we’re offering is backed by the best in science can offer. And what do we mean by that? Mostly we mean validity. Mostly we mean predicting the outcomes that we say we can predict. We mean that when our assessment or a report tells you that this is how others are going to see you, that that’s actually true, that it’s not just sort of close to true or kind of true or not even true at all, which, you know, quite frankly, Anthony, anybody can make a personality assessment and sell it.

There’s no regulating body for personality assessments in the US. And so, you know, we stake our reputation on the fact that what we say is accurate and true. And I think that’s what really sets us apart.

Anthony Codispoti: So what’s the profile of a typical customer? And what’s the profile of the position that they traditionally come to you for? Like, I could see it being like your customer profile being sort of like a combination of directly the companies themselves, as well as maybe like recruiters, executive recruiters, or, you know, staffing companies. And I would think that I’m sure that the assessments, you know, they’re obviously they’re not free. And you’re, you know, giving them to multiple people, probably more like executive level positions that people are coming to you for.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, so, you know, we got our foundations actually, and completely in the selection side of the business today, we’re probably about 60% development, 40% selection.

Anthony Codispoti: What does that mean 60% development?

Ryne Sherman: Yes, it’s about 60% of the people who take our assessments are taking it for some sort of development, like, okay, I want to get feedback, like I’m already in a role that’s considering me for another role, but it’s not it’s not a selection profile. So they’re not saying if you fit this or fit that, you’re going to get it or not. It’s just here, we want to give you some feedback, some awareness so that you can try to improve in whatever ways those might be.

Whereas in the selection role, we typically are giving the this person’s a high fit, this person’s a moderate fit, this person’s a low fit kind of information. But our origination was was actually truck drivers. We originally started by going to trucking companies and saying, hey, we can help you reduce accidents. And we’ve got a bunch of data on this, by the way, safety is a hugely important issue in many, many industries. But we started with truck drivers and saying, hey, we can help you reduce accidents. It turns out for most trucking companies, if they have an accident, they cost them anywhere between $1 to $2 million, just to deal with the done, you know, all of the issues that come up with an accident. So paying $34 or $45 for a personality assessment, it turns out to be a really huge savings for them.

Anthony Codispoti: And what are you looking for in that particular case? Are you looking for like impulsivity or, I don’t know.

Ryne Sherman: So those are the kinds of things. Yeah, exactly. So we look for people who are impulsive, people who are going to follow the rules that, you know, a lot of the safety rules are for safety reasons, right? So people who are much more likely to follow those kinds of things. People who are going to be stay alert, not get bored easily, particularly if they’re doing long haul truck driving, right? So people who are easily bored and aren’t so great, and then that kind of rolls as well.

So those kinds of things. So, but yeah, the typical customer these days is, well, we work with about 75% of the Fortune 500. That’s in the US, of course. And then around the globe, we work with many multinational companies. I mean, pretty much every company you’ve heard of, as at some point, come to work with us, which is pretty remarkable given our, you know, originations. But they typically come to us with some talent problem, right? So one talent problem, maybe we’re trying to identify our high potentials for this particular role. I gave us some examples about safety, you know, we’re concerned about safety on these oil drilling platforms. And we want to make sure that we’ve got the right people in the right roles for that. A lot of airline pilots, again, same kind of thing, looking for people who could be safe and ensure that, you know, the planes land. And then lots of it is on that leadership development side. So we’ve got, you know, it could be any company in the world where they have executives in their corporate offices, and they’re trying to identify that next step up for executives.

And we help them either on the identification side, or we help them around the development side for those individuals. So that’s pretty typical. We don’t do any business sort of like, like if you’re listening to podcasts, and you say, Oh, I’d really like to take a Hogan assessment and learn more about myself. We don’t really do that. We really only work B2B. So, you know, but if you’re in a company, where that’s a thing that you would do, there’s probably someone in your HR staff who can certainly connect with our folks at Hogan. We offer certification for people who so many of the clients that we work with have certified individuals inside their organization.

So they actually handle all the assessment, they go deliver the results to their teams and their staff inside, they maybe even run team sessions for entire groups of teams, they do that all internally, and they just use us to help provide them with the assessments. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti: Interesting. You know, we mentioned in the intro, diversity and inclusion are important things at Hogan. How do you help organizations kind of address diversity and inclusion challenges kind of beyond the usual check the box initiatives? Yeah.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah. So one of the, well, when Hogan assessments was founded, right, when Joyce and Robert really got started with this business, it was coming off of the Civil Rights Act. And there were a number of organizations saying, Okay, well, how can we identify how can we hire individuals in a fair way in a way that doesn’t violate the Civil Rights Act? And some of those organizations were using IQ tests IQ tests, notoriously have racial differences, right, that some rates of score differently than others on IQ tests. And so what you end up with is a situation where you have a sort of an unfair or a sort of a bias in your hiring. Now, people can debate about whether or not the IQ tests are valid.

I’m not going to talk about that here today. But what I will say is that for personality assessments, there are no racial differences. There are no gender differences in personality assessments.

So we find that men and women get about the same scores, every race gets about the same scores. I mean, there are tiny differences. But these are when we’re talking about differences, we’re talking about non meaningful, not like any two groups, you give me any two groups in the world, you know, and we measure them on any metric, and there’s always going to be some difference, right, at some, you know, to the third, fourth, fifth decimal point, there’s always going to be some difference. So there are differences. But these differences aren’t practically meaningful when it comes to making things like personnel decisions. So what happens is when people use our assessments for making personnel decisions, it sort of levels the playing field from a racial standpoint or from a from a gender standpoint, because or age the same thing. We, because you don’t know, right, it could be, it could be, I mean, I’ve actually done these kinds of things. I’ve tried to do analyses to say, just how good can I predict someone’s race from our assessments? The answer is not very well, which is great. From my perspective, it’s, it’s,

Anthony Codispoti: but you feel like you could from an IQ test.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, you can, you can predict it from IQ test fairly well. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so that’s the beauty of these tests is they sort of level the playing field. They say, Hey, if this person’s a good fit for the profile, if they have the right skills. And in fact, that’s what Robert and Joyce Hogan were trying to do. They were trying to level the playing field. So here’s a way that you can evaluate candidates for a job that’s unbiased.

And what other method has that? I mean, I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of interviews as a method for hiring individuals, but interviews have inherent potential for bias. I’m not saying that interviews are inherently biased, but they have inherent potential for bias. You can tell, you know, someone’s typically you can tell someone’s ethnicity, you can tell their age, you can tell their gender, typically you could tell those kinds of things from from an interview that you can’t with a personality assessment. And so what we advise clients to do is evaluate your candidates with a personality assessment first so that you can get a nice base of individuals.

And then of course, use the other kinds of assessments you want to do along the way. But it’s a way of not excluding people that you that might have historically been excluded for other reasons for. And again, I’m not trying to say there’s malicious intent on the part of some of these employers.

In some cases, there’s a lot of research on this as well. We know that the people have these implicit biases, they don’t even know that they’re biased in a certain way. I’m biased against people who have a certain college degree or certain background. The personality assessments sort of level that playing field and they create a way for for organization.

In fact, I’ve told organizations this before, if you use personality assessments to make your your hiring promoting decisions, if that’s all you use, I’m not saying you should, but if that’s all you used, you would not have adverse impact problems, you wouldn’t have diversity issues.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s interesting. Do you see anybody do it that way? Where they only using the personnel? Because I guess in order for that to be effective, it would have to be like the results would have to be blind, right? Like you’re not attaching them to like a person’s file.

Ryne Sherman: That’s right. Yeah. So I mean, look, the reality is people are always going to use other information. I mean, there’s other information that’s relevant for the job personality systems aren’t the only piece of information that’s relevant. You’re going to want to know the person’s background and experiences. Are they qualified for the job and sort of the core competencies to do the job well? So I think it’s sort of an impossible world to think, but from our perspective, it helps level the playing field, helps create more equal environment.

Anthony Codispoti: Ryan, can you share a moment from your early days as Chief Science Officer that maybe highlights Hogan’s commitment to innovation and data driven decision making?

Ryne Sherman: For sure. Yeah. Look, when I first got to Hogan, Well, I will say this, you know, my team, most people like our team and get along with our team, but our team sometimes pushes for things that our data science team pushes for things that the rest of the business might not like. You know, we push for updates on things. So one of the first things we pushed for was changing the way our assessment data are collected. So for many, many years, the Hogan’s assessments were collected on a true false format. So either marked true or false to every item. We pushed really hard to move from a true false format to a one to four sort of rating format or strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree rating format.

So now there’s four options instead of two. And there was a lot of pushback. I mean, there was the it challenges. I mean, it sounds easy, right? Oh, but you just change the assessment.

No problem. But the it challenges on this are immense. You have to translate all of that into 40 languages.

You have to be able to explain the instructions and everything else to all these people are all around the world. You have to impact current clients who are using it. You have to build a new norm. And we take a tremendous amount of pride in our global norm.

We have the most representative global norm of the global working population ever created. From a personality standpoint, what does that mean? Well, what it means is we have people in our database you mentioned earlier 11 million people. We’ve got we have data from so many people in so many different jobs around so many different countries who speak so many different languages, a different job levels all over the world that we can actually stratify these data to create a norm or to create a sample that represents the global working population. And so when you get scores on our assessments, you don’t just we don’t just tell you why you scored seven out of 12 on this on this scale.

We tell you where you fell in terms of a percentile relative to the global working population because we have such an incredible sample of workers are from around the world who’ve taken our assessments. And so the challenge, though, Anthony was, we said this we know this is a better way we know we can get better data, we know we can provide more clear insights if we go to this four point measurement response. And the reason it was true false, by the way, was because as we talked about earlier, we talked about bubbles. Turns out when you’re programming stuff on old computer systems, the true false way of scoring was way way easier, way less complicated. So lots of the classic tests and personality assessment were true false because it just was a way simpler way of measuring things.

But we knew in the sort of, you know, the modern era that we needed to go to four point. And again, there was a lot of pushback, you know, you know, well, what will clients think? Well, they think that the previous results were invalid because now the norms change and because we have to change the norms and because, you know, they might get a slightly different score this time than they got last time.

We’re going to think that this is, you know, there was lots of concerns about those kinds of things. But at the end of the day, we knew it was the right thing to do. We knew this was a better way of getting those insights, delivering more accurate insights. And, you know, we ultimately we pushed this through, even though through tremendous amount of work to do.

And many, many people had to put in lots and lots of hours, including our IT team had to put in a tremendous amount of work to make all this happen. But every now and then I get a case back where somebody said, you know, I took these assessments when I was on two point and now I took them again on our four point scoring. And, you know, they mean so much more to me now. I’ve gotten so much more. I’ve picked up these little extra nuances. There’s all this little extra information that you can get now that you couldn’t get before. And that really makes me smile.

That makes me feel really good about the work we do because I know, again, I don’t think it made us adopt. I don’t think there was a single customer or single person out there that was like, oh, Hogan’s going to four point. Now we really want to use Hogan. I just don’t think that’s true. But we just knew scientifically it was the right thing to do. And it was absolutely a challenge. But I think it was worth fighting for.

Anthony Codispoti: So let me extrapolate that out and see if there’s any validity to this. So you went from two point to four point, right? Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree. Is there any argument to be made to go and do like a 10 point scale where it’s like, where do you fall on this spectrum? Or does that like, does it get to a point where you’re, you’re kind of asking to get into a level of minutia that’s really sort of hard for somebody to quantify in their head? Yeah.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a good question because that’s exactly, you know, in fact, there’s entire, there’s entire academic literature dedicated to the study of should it be three points or four or five or seven or nine or right. And there’s actually people who’ve done and some people use a hundred point scales and there’s all kinds of different. Yeah. And it turns out that most

Anthony Codispoti: of the research like a point of diminishing returns. Yeah, exactly. Most of the research suggests that anything above seven is absolutely to use a technical word nonsense. Like basically people can’t tell. Can you tell the difference between somebody who’s a 95 out of 100 and 94 out of 100?

Ryne Sherman: I don’t write. I can’t. And it’s the same thing. Even if you go down to nine, 10, 12, seven seems to be there seems to be a little bit maybe hints of return, but most of the return you get is somewhere between four and five. That’s what the research suggests that four and five is really optimal for the, for the most bang for your buck return.

It’s also a little bit more taxing to do. If you go to, if you go to seven, nine, right, it’s just a little bit harder for the raider because now they’re using a little bit more space. If you’re thinking about your mouse and moving your mouse across the screen, I will also say one of the cool things about four point is that our phones are nicely in boxes, right? So we have nice. So it’s really easy to mark one of four boxes on the UI.

Anthony Codispoti: It’s important. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you mentioned that you’ve got this norm for 11 million people who have taken your assessments over many, many years. What kind of interesting or surprising things have you guys been able to learn from that huge collection of data?

Ryne Sherman: Well, yeah. So some of the most interesting things I think are when you look at cross cultural kinds of things. So you say, okay, well, how does this culture compare to that culture or this country or that country? And one of the things that comes out is that you actually just don’t see that many differences that people are kind of people wherever you go around the world.

At the same time, there are some and some of those differences are quite interesting. For example, we know that in Japan, specifically, leaders tend to score quite a bit lower on ambition than in other parts of the world. And that’s also true inside Asia. Some people say, oh, that’s Asia. That’s an Asian thing.

It’s not. It’s really specific to Japan and Japanese leader leaders and specific to that kind of culture. There’s much more of a self-effacing kind of culture there where people are not. They’re not supposed to sort of self-present. They’re not supposed to present themselves as being more motivated, more hardworking than others. That being seen as ambitious is sometimes seen as a problem in Japan. So there are those kinds of things. And at the same time, you learn really interesting things because you might say, well, like I said, oh, this is an Asia thing.

But no, we don’t see that. In China, we see people who actually score higher than average, the global population on ambition, not much, but a little bit higher than the global population. So these kinds of differences, I think, are really remarkable.

And they have implications for doing business in those cultures, doing businesses in different climates. And I think so some of those are the kinds of insights we found. But I mean, we have, I hate to put it this way, but we have hundreds of studies lying around our archive that I wish were publicly available information.

And they’re not private because we want them to be private. We just only have so much time. There’s only so much time that we have to disseminate the information, the knowledge that we have. But we just have so many amazing studies that have been done by our staff inside that are just full of insight. I feel like we could hire an academic to come just publish, publish, publish research from inside our house for years because there’s so much knowledge there.

Anthony Codispoti: Is there any thought or any movement to take all these data sets and feed them into some sort of an internal large language model into an AI?

Ryne Sherman: In fact, that’s a really good question. In fact, that’s actually something we did last year. We have a tool that we call that my team built. We call it Hogan Brain because, yeah, so what happens is clients come to us with questions. They come to us with questions about what does this report mean? How do I understand this? How can I interpret this?

I saw a set of scores like this. How should I handle this with a client? And we’ve, in many cases, answered those questions through many FAQs, many internal white papers and documents, policies, technical papers. And in fact, somebody, it wasn’t me, but somebody on our team decided it was a really good idea to archive all of our emails to those questions. So when somebody would ask us a question and some of us would write an email back answering that question, somebody archived all of those emails. We have this entire knowledge base of those things. And we’ve had this available for a while, but the problem is it’s hard to search.

It’s hard to find the thing you’re looking for in there. But with Hogan Brain, we fed it all of that knowledge. And it’s an AI tool. And now all you have to do is ask your question to Hogan Brain. And Hogan Brain provides you with an answer to your question based on this huge archive of technical reports, technical manuals, white papers, knowledge-based, email responses. And the really cool thing to me, Anthony, is the guy who we had worked on this also made it so that not only doesn’t answer your question, it gives you the source that it got the answer from. So you can click your one click away from going to the source of that document, finding that thing where you got the answer. So to me, it’s a really, really powerful tool. And I feel like pretty much every organization has these kinds of problems where you have, you know, huge numbers of policies and procedures that, Jesus, it’s hard to keep track of all this stuff where you could have a tool like that inside. So yeah, that’s a really good question and a really good insight. But yeah, we just launched that internally just this last year.

Anthony Codispoti: Does that data set also include results from the 11 million assessments that have been taken over the years?

Ryne Sherman: So it does not include those results, but it includes kind of summaries and white papers. So like, for example, our norm documentation is included. So the document that built that norm where we sort of, you know, where we said, you know, this is the norm and this is how we built it. So that document is included in there. But those individual assessment results, no, those are stored in a separate database.

Anthony Codispoti: Is there like a privacy concern that the AI may, you know, reveal some like, oh yeah, John Smith, this is what he said. And, you know, here’s the, I’ll use John Smith as an example.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, it’s not so much a privacy concern, although that is something that we take very seriously at Hogan and we don’t, you know, we don’t share individual responses or anything like that. That’s all when we analyze data on my team, we do it anonymously because we don’t want to have any of that kind of thing. Like lots of, again, lots of really high profile individuals come to us to take our assessments for serious work. And so, you know, we don’t sell that data.

We only work directly with the client. That’s who gets the data and that’s it. But it’s more because the Hogan brain really works on text information a lot better. I guess there isn’t a lot of information for it to glean out of the numbers information. And like, again, in many cases, we’ve taken that numerical information and we’ve done stuff with that and turned it into reports. And that’s really what the Hogan brain works off of is that the text information.

Anthony Codispoti: And the reason I asked Ryan is because I don’t know, it seems to me that, you know, you guys said you’ve, you know, you’ve assessed the results from these 11 million different assessments over the years.

And by and large, with some exceptions, like you mentioned with the Japanese exception, by and large, people are the same, you know, regardless of, you know, where they live in the world, race, gender, etc. It occurs to me that it is probably hard for the human brain and all the data analytical tools that you have to maybe spots some of the different nuances which might exist that you haven’t picked up on. Is there a possibility that having Hogan brain be able to access all that data would surface something interesting or useful?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, that is possible in terms of sort of pulling out some kind of insights from that data. I think one way that we have used AI and this is a little different tool, we don’t call this one Hogan brain, we call this one Hogan AI assistant is to actually aid in interpretation. So one thing that happens with our assessments is when you take our three core assessments, you get scores on 28 scales and over 100 sub scales. That can be difficult, you know, for somebody, especially if you’re new to our assessments to even if you’ve been certified, if you’re just newly certified to really go, ooh, what’s the story here? What are the key drivers for this person?

What are the key issues that this person might face in the workplace? We have built another little tool that actually can take all that information and it does kind of what you were suggesting is it actually interprets that information, tries to identify these are the key patterns, these are the key things to look out for. And that tool is trained on lots of our interpretation documentation. It’s trained on coaching interpretations, things like that and uses that information to say, ah, this is what you these might be the key strengths in this individual to have these might be some key weaknesses. This might be, in fact, you can actually combine it with job descriptions, which is pretty cool.

So you can say how might they be fit for this role and what way what things might they need to work on to be a better fit for the role. Pretty cool. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: So I’m kind of curious, Brian, as the chief science officer there at Hogan, what does that mean exactly? Are you kind of overseeing like a team of quants and, you know, data analytic people? Are you kind of paint a picture what that role is?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, well, I’ll say a couple things. First of all, I didn’t I didn’t come up with the title. Somebody else said this is the titles. Here you go. So I think it’s a obnoxious title.

Anthony Codispoti: Are you just being modest like you don’t like being the chief of something? That show up in your personality assessment, maybe monastic?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I definitely was not the title I picked, but it’s OK. I yeah, so I’ve got about 12 PhD or masters level people with PhDs or masters who work on on my team. They’re divided up into several teams. So one of our teams does all of the core stuff on our assessments. So that means updating our assessments, updating our assessment items to make sure the items are still culturally relevant. All the translation work on our items, which by the way is a massive process. And it’s incredibly challenging to make sure that the translated that the items that we use in one language work in another language. We actually just won an award for that last year for the work that my team did on that.

Anthony Codispoti: Just making sure that the word choice is the correct one like that kind of thing.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, and you can’t you can’t just literally translate an item from one language to another. It has to mean the same thing in another language. So sometimes literal translations don’t get it you need. And so we work with local psychologists in those in those countries or local experts in that language to help us build better. And then of course we collect lots of data to make sure that the items are actually working the same way psychometrically. So we have one team that’s focused on that we have a team who works on custom solutions for our clients. So sometimes clients come to us with their own competency model. They say, well, this is what it takes to be successful in our organization and we can take those competencies translate those into our terms, translate those into our scales and our assessments and give them back scores in their terms to say, OK, this is what you’re looking for.

This is what this is how this person is going to look in terms of your competencies. We have another team who’s dedicated solely to archiving all of the knowledge and all the research that we have building dashboards so that we have access to these kind of information to have benchmarks. So people will come to us and say, do you know anything about C-suite individuals working in the gas and oil industry? And well, yeah, we do.

We have a fairly large but we have dashboards now that we can access that really quickly. And then we have another branch that’s dedicated solely to research. So we have like and by research, I mean a research for the good of personality science. So we have many people who want to collaborate with us to come in to get access to our data. So we have a branch that’s dedicated to working with those collaborators. Many of these are academics who work at different academic institutions. We’ve I don’t know how many PhDs have people have done their dissertations using using data at Hogan. And so we have a branch that’s dedicated that so and then we have about at any given time another 10 or 12 interns who come and work with us as well. These are typically PhD students, but sometimes master students as well from all over the U.S. who come to work as interns for us and get training in this kind of work.

And often quite frankly, the interns bring their own skill set and knowledge and help us innovate and create for the future as well. So yeah, so that’s you know, that’s sort of I oversee that as a secondary part of my role. I do things like this. You know, I go talk about personality science. I’m on the road about 50% of the year.

I’m somewhere I’m in some other country and and I’m speaking to our distributors there. I’m speaking to clients there about personality assessment about leadership and about how personality assessment can help them in their organizations.

Anthony Codispoti: Ryan, tell us about the science of personality podcast. Who’s your co-host? Where can we find it? What do you talk about?

Ryne Sherman: Sure. Yeah. So this was an idea that we had in about late 2019. We said, hey, we should start a podcast. We’ve got a lot of content. We have a lot of knowledge, a lot of information about personality. And we think maybe people would be interested in hearing about these kinds of things, this kind of information.

And then COVID happened. And we said, yeah, I think this might really be a good time to do that. And so in 2020, about mid-year 2020, we had our first episode. I think we’re around 120 episodes or something now. We release a new episode every two weeks. You can find that on, you know, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

You can also go to thescienceofpersonality.com as a dedicated website with our podcasts as well. And my co-host is Blake Lepp, who’s Hogan’s PR manager. We decided that the two of us would do it because we would just have these conversations. You know, him being in marketing and me being in research, we would just walk by and we’d be chatting about these things and about personality and about how it’s relevant. And a lot of our podcasts, we make sports references because we talk about this athlete or this coach or this organization and what they’re doing.

And so we try to use those kinds of examples and talk about businesses and organizations. And we just basically translated those conversations that we would have into these podcasts. We also bring on guests, I would say, about 75, 80% of our episodes have a guest. There’s usually some expert in some area. And we bring them on to talk about some recent study that they’ve done or some knowledge area that they have. We’ve had an incredible string of really amazing guests who have come on to talk about their experiences and their knowledge and share their research with us. But we’ve covered many, many topics all around personality, the dark side. We’ve talked about sleep and we’ve talked about all kinds of other psychologically interesting phenomena. We’ve done things on psychopaths and killers and other kinds of things on there.

We’ve had some really interesting guests. If listeners are interested, you can go check that out. You don’t have to listen to them all in order or anything. So you can just pick out the topics that you want.

Anthony Codispoti: It’s not a sequential kind of a series like every episode is its own set of content. That’s right. So find a title that seems interesting to you and dive in. Ryan, shifting gears on you, I would like to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life, whether it’s personal or professional or combination of the two. What it was like getting through that and some lessons that you learned coming out the other side.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, you know, you mentioned this before we started recording here, Anthony. I have to admit that I feel guilty sort of even talking about this because I feel like the challenges that I’ve faced in my life are not really much in comparison to what I know many people have faced in their lives. And so it’s sort of difficult for me to say, oh, this is a challenge that I faced when I feel like I know so many people have overcome much more difficult. Gosh, I think I had a great childhood growing up. I had a great education, had great, great opportunities. So it’s hard for me to say like, oh, I’ve really had a lot of challenges. But one thing did come to mind for me.

And that is that I’ve always felt for whatever reason, always sort of been overlooked and for whatever it was, right? So I might, gosh, I could go back to being in grade school or even in middle school. And, you know, when you think about things like student council positions, when you think about playing, you know, for sports teams and athletic teams and things like that. And just sort of being like, oh, this is a person who doesn’t get picked. But then they go, oh, wait a minute, this person was better than we thought.

You know, I felt that, yeah, there’s been lots of times for that. I think for graduate school, I was one of the few graduate students taken who got into graduate school who was not given any additional funding. So I had to teach right away in graduate school. But then later on, won awards for being one of the top graduate students in the program. So it just always felt like, you know, I felt like when I was an academic, I mean, I applied for over 100 academic jobs coming out of graduate school, more than 100 jobs. I got two, three interviews, I believe, yeah, three interviews out of 100 jobs. And thankfully, I did end up getting two job offers and ultimately took one. But then even subsequently, I applied for probably over the next four or five years, another 100 jobs and got another maybe three interviews out of that. And which is, I feel like even in this role, I can remember after my first or second year in this role, the COO came up to me and said, you know, you’re a lot better than we thought you were going to be.

And I always thought, yeah, this happens a lot. You know, I can tell you the other funny thing, Anthony, about having a PhD in some kind of field and sort of being seen as, you know, quote unquote, you know, smart guy, a science guy, something like that, is that people assume that you can’t, you’re not very athletic. But, you know, I was on a state championship baseball team. I was a captain of the team in high school. I played division three baseball in college. I coach my kids baseball team now. And it’s funny because every now and then we’ll have a corporate event like we had a corporate pickleball event a few weeks ago.

And some of the people in the company were like, oh, wow, we didn’t realize that you were athletic. I just, I just, I don’t know. So for me, I just feel like we often make assumptions about people. I guess that’s what it means to me. And that, I think part of this is my draw to personality assessments is that we often make assumptions about what we think people are like, just how good they are at something or how not. And a lot of times those assumptions are just wrong. We just base those assumptions on the wrong pieces of information.

We base those assumptions on stereotypes. And, and so for me, I think that’s part of the reason why I’m really drawn to personality assessments because they, they provide this opportunity for people to tell you who they are and to, and to describe themselves to you in a way that, you know, that we often don’t see when we just look at them from the outside.

Anthony Codispoti: So one thing I’ve noticed in my 50 plus years on this earth and interacting with people is that there are some people that sort of fall into the category that you described there where it’s like, wow, like that person really ended up surprising me. And there are people sort of at the other end of the spectrum where it’s like, and I thought they were going to be really good and they just were not. Wow.

Ryne Sherman: Most professional sports drafts are full of what we, those kind of people.

Anthony Codispoti: Right, right. And what I’ve sort of ascertained from that, and I don’t have the background that you do. So I’d be super curious to get your take on this is that you just have some people who are naturally better promoters, self promoters, like they know how to pump themselves up.

There is a, I don’t know, a charisma, a machismo or a confidence that comes through and sort of how they present themselves. And it’s not always backed up by anything real. And then there are folks who, they just know how to get stuff done. They had to figure stuff out. They know how to roll up their sleeves and connect the dots.

And they’re just, you know, they just, they don’t present, they don’t throw themselves kind of out there as well. And so they’re a little bit easier to miss. Am I onto something here?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, that’s absolutely the case. In fact, it’s funny you mentioned it that way because we’ve done quite a bit of research on this, particularly in the leadership space. There’s, when people think about studying leadership, they think, ah, let’s study the people in charge. That’s what it means to understand leadership.

You got to go find the people who are in charge and study them. But it turns out that there’s a fundamental difference between getting in charge of an organization and leading an organization effectively. And most research on leadership doesn’t make that distinction. And it turns out certain people and personalities are really good predictor, by the way, of who gets into leadership positions. Like it predicts really well. Like, you know, what we call leadership emergence. And it’s doing those kinds of things. It’s having that charisma or what my kids tell me is Riz these days.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, having that kind of Riz to get yourself into those leadership positions.

Ryne Sherman: And other people don’t. They just don’t. They don’t do. So it’s exactly what you just said. And it turns out that the relationship between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness is really almost zero. That there’s very little overlap between those two things. So you can be really emergent and be really effective or be terribly ineffective. And we can’t tell based on how you’re how emergent you are. But the thing that I’ve noticed is we fall in love all the time with leadership emergence.

We fall in love with people who present a vision for the future. Who can tell us this is what’s going to be great. This is what the future is going to look like with with me in charge. And and you see it all the time at shareholders meetings.

You see it quite frankly and political campaigns. Right. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about selling some kind of a message that people are going to fall in love with. Whether you can deliver on that message or not tends to often be irrelevant. It’s it’s much more about, you know, winning the game of getting in the position and less about being effective. And unfortunately, as humans, we fall for it all the time.

Anthony Codispoti: All the time. Right. We want that confident, charismatic person out front until they get there. And we realize, wow, there wasn’t a whole lot of substance there. Do you have any advice or coaching to offer for people who kind of fit into this category? They are great at what they do. They would make great leaders, but they don’t exhibit that. I think you call it leadership emergence quality.

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, it’s really challenging because a lot of these effective leaders tend to they tend to actually be more humble. All right. So they actually have a tendency to not to sort of

Anthony Codispoti: down says the guy who did not like his title of chief science officer. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry.

Ryne Sherman: Go ahead. The example here. They tend to downplay those kind of accomplishments. They tend not to advertise those. They tend to think that those things are irrelevant. And, you know, the advice that we give them on the coaching front is in fact we have a model at Hogan about high potential and part of high potential is actually standing out.

You have to do things to make yourself stand out. And so we coach them around that a little bit. Obviously, you have to be careful because if this goes too far, it can become problematic and it feels very unnatural for these individuals. They even even when you coach them in these ways, they tend to still like, you know, you’ll tell them, hey, I want you to go over and. And, you know, play yourself up on this particular thing that you worked on this thing and come back and tell us how you did and they’ll come back and tell you.

You’ll say, okay, well, how do you, you know, on a scale of, you know, one to 10 with one being totally lacking self confidence and 10 being way over confident. Where do you think they were? And they’ll be like, oh, I was at nine and everybody watching be like, you were three. You’re not even close to where you think, right? So, so we tend to just, we really have a hard time stepping out of our comfort zone on those kinds of things. But, but those are the kinds of things that we might coach somebody like that to do.

Anthony Codispoti: No, Ryan, I just have one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, for everyone listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Ryan has been an amazing guest. Please hit the like, share, subscribe button in your favorite podcast app. Ryan, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah, the best way to get in contact with me is LinkedIn. I have people who connect with me there on, I’m, you know, if you, if you, I only say, I only don’t connect with people who are clearly trying to sell me something. So, you know, if you’re, you know, if you’re, if you’re an honest listener and you just want to be connected on LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect with people there.

So that’s a great way. If you have questions, you want to message me there as well. And if we have to go dig deeper, I’m happy to share, share my email with you through that. And go into further questions, but, but that’s the best place to reach out to. So we’ll be sure to, very easy to find because my name’s pretty unique. So is it.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, Ryan is part spelled a R Y N E and then Sherman just like it sounds S H E R M A N. So you can search on that if you just happen to be listening. If you’re somewhere where you’re able to see the show notes, we’ll put a link to his LinkedIn profile there in the show notes. So last question for you, Ryan, is I’m kind of curious what you see the big changes coming to the assessment industry in the next couple of years. How do you see things kind of opening up here?

Ryne Sherman: Yeah. Well, technology is always having the biggest impact in it. I mean, there are, you know, we’ve talked earlier about the sort of way we do assessments sort of being this traditional way. And I think, you know, I’m very open to alternative ways of doing assessments to, you know, when we carry these things around in our pockets that track where we go, who we interact with, they track what we say and do all the time.

Perhaps that’s a better way to get insight into who we are as individuals and to provide those insights into people. Those are the kind of technology things that I’m looking for going forward. I think obviously artificial intelligence is having a big impact in the way the assessment world works and how assessments are developed, how people take assessments, how people combat potential cheating using artificial intelligence to take assessments and those kinds of things as well. So those are the kinds of things that we’re working on here. But I think artificial intelligence has the potential to provide more coaching in a pocket for individuals as well to provide insight to individuals that they can use on a day to day basis.

And I think that that’s for the future of the assessment world is going is sort of democratizing assessment, making it so that assessment isn’t just for people who work at the biggest companies in the world, but also for most everyday people who can get really highly valid scientific assessments to help them in their own individual lives.

Anthony Codispoti: Ryan, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Ryne Sherman: Well, thank you so much for having me, Anthony. I really appreciate the conversation.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.