Revolutionizing the Talent Acquisition in Sports
The corporate world has used personality, communication, work-place performance, and leadership assessments for decades.
True, sporting organizations do too, but not nearly to the same degree. Scouting and recruiting professionals spend countless hours on the road and scouring the internet for insight into a player’s background. They talk to former coaches and teachers, they talk to parents and grandparents, and they are in regular communication with the athletes themselves.
All of this is in an effort to get the best understanding of the individual’s personality before inviting them to join the team. It makes sense that this kind of research would reveal critical personality information. By compiling all these data points, the theory goes that scouts, recruiters, coaches and other leaders should be able to get a sense of how this individual will impact the team and contribute to the overall performance.
There is obvious value in regular communication with the athletes directly and the people around them. The insights that come from these conversations are rich and important.
How those conversations are substantiated — or not — by the outcomes of personality assessments is due for criticism.
A new way for sport
Where conversation is rich with bias and subjectivity as a primary means of understanding personality, academic assessments offer a more balanced approach to understanding an athlete. Academic assessments of athletes are conducted in an effort to mitigate the limitations of regular conversation. Surfacing alignment or disconnects between the subjective/anecdotal data gathered from interviews offers insight into an athlete’s self-awareness or lack thereof.
Despite current research and technological innovations, sporting teams have relied on the same academic assessments. These assessments require an individual to sit in a sterile environment to take a test. Even more challenging, teams have to conduct multiple assessments to get a well-rounded scope of an athlete: one assessment for communication, one for leadership, one for cognition, and one for personality. That can take up to 6 hours per athlete!
Not only is this a time-consuming process, these assessments exist in a context that is not replicated in ‘the workplace’. But there are also other serious limitations to traditional assessments.
Communication in a sporting context is largely spoken. Bubble tests, email, and long-form writing are simply not how players and coaches communicate with each other. The workplace of sport requires people to communicate with each other face-to-face.
So why are sporting organizations reliant on assessments that offer limited contextual value? At one point, it made sense that personality assessment be conducted this way — it was the best alternative to off-setting the limitation of regular conversation. But this simply isn’t the case anymore.
Collegiate and professional sports are prime-time entertainment. Athletes are not just elite performers; they have full personalities, opinions, passion projects, and interests outside of sports. Both consumers and sporting organizations themselves know this. The advent of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) speaks directly to the impact individual personalities have on the team’s popularity and economy.
All of that time in front of a camera — side-line interviews, off-season press events, behind the scenes events, etc. — provide untapped data.
Personality is revealed through our language. Whether written or spoken, players and coaches are providing a treasure trove of information on who they are. How adaptable they are in new situations, how stress prone they are, how assertive they may be, as examples, are all hidden in the words they use. Not using the language of athletes to complete personality assessments is a huge missed opportunity. Until recently, the technology simply hasn’t existed to gather that language and process it.
But that’s changing.
Meet Mental Metrix Impact Reports
Without ever having to meet with your athlete, Mental Metrix is able to provide over 70 data points on athletes using their own words. No testing room environment required.
See our One-Sheet PDF for a detailed overview of the process.
Removes Bias: Academic assessments remove the listener's conversational bias. However, assessments conducted in a testing environment are still subject to test-taker influence. Athletes may respond inauthentically, responding to prompts based on what they think teams want to know instead of what is true. Using language profiles removes this possibility because language is collected across multiple contexts.
Measurable Outputs & Comparison Sets: Academic assessments give quantifiable information in a way subjective narrative assessments cannot. This can be used for comparison sets against other athletes or to understand alignment with leadership.
Scientifically Valid: Not all assessments are created equally. Mental Metrix provides only data that withstand academic scrutiny and peer revisions. The science behind language-based personality assessments can be found in over 20,000 peer-reviewed journals/articles.
Reflects Context of Sport: Language-based assessments gather language in the context most relevant to the workplace. Rather than sitting in a testing environment or depending on lengthy paragraph responses, Mental Metrix gathers spoken language most relevant to an athlete's job.
Provides Multiple Outputs: Traditional assessments must be administered one at a time. For example, to get a communication output, one would have to take a communication assessment. To get a personality output, one would have to take a personality assessment. By contrast, language sets can be processed to produce multiple outcomes—Personality, Leadership, Communication, Motivators and stressors, and Thinking Styles—in a single Impact Report.
Quick: Mental Metrix never has to meet the athletes or coaches to run reports and we never assess them directly. So long as there is a language set available, we can process reports in seconds. Your Mental Metrix representative will help you identify the sources of language most critical to your mission.
Uses Spoken Language: Traditional academic assessments often rely on Likert Scale prompts. These Strongly Agree - Strongly Disagree statements reduce the nuance and complexity of personality and communication and are inauthentic to a sporting context.
Output Goes Beyond Types: Reducing a personality to a single “type” provides little context or nuance. There are countless combinations of personality and communication traits. By reducing someone to a single trait you lose an understanding of ‘the degree to which’ an individual demonstrates traits.
