As documented in the popular book Moneyball (Lewis, 2003), professional sports teams have dramatically shifted to using sports analytics to predict the success of athletes. While teams use a wide range of data to do this, they have not fully exploited standardized psychological assessment in their analytical models. In fact, many have questioned whether psychological assessments are useful for predicting success in the unique context of professional sports. This presentation describes the Player Assessment Test (PAT) project, which was implemented by the NFL in 2013 for all players attending the NFL Combine from 2013-2020. Results of a multi-year validation study have demonstrated that the PAT significantly correlates with a number of player performance outcomes. This presentation reviews these results and discusses how psychological assessments like the PAT provide critical data that can be used in a variety of college and professional sports to make selection decisions and develop talent. While this project focused on the NFL bringing a human capital lens to enhance talent decisions for the sport, many lessons were learned that can be leveraged in more traditional organizational settings.

Presenter Bios

Harold Goldstein, Ph.D. is a Professor at Baruch College, the City University of New York and a founder of Siena Consulting. He is an expert in personnel selection, equal employment opportunity issues, and leadership development. He is known for his work in the measurement of intelligence with reduced racial and gender subgroup differences. His work has been recognized by honors such as the IPAC award for Innovations in Testing. He also serves as an expert to the US Department of Justice on legal issues in personnel selection processes.

Charles Scherbaum, PhD. is a Professor at Baruch College, the City University of New York and a senior scientist at Siena Consulting. Charles is an expert in diversity and equal opportunity in employee selection, measuring individual differences, and analytics. His research has been published in a variety of the top journal in IO psychology. Charles has been recognized by SIOP and IPAC with several of their top awards for his work on reducing adverse impact and validating selection assessments. Charles is a past president of Metro.

Ken Yusko, Ph.D. is a Professor at the University of Maryland and a founder of Siena Consulting. Ken is an expert in the design of personnel selection and performance management systems and has worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and professional sports teams. Ken regularly publishes and was recently awarded the M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research for his work in cognitive ability testing that enhances both the diversity and quality of new hires.

Elliott Larson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, the City University of New York and a senior consultant at Siena Consulting. He has published in the areas of personnel selection, intelligence, advanced analytics, and emotions in the workplace. Elliott has also led applied research examining the predictive validity and group score differences of cognitive and non-cognitive assessments in high-stakes testing situations.