Adam Grant, PhD
Optimize Hire’s pre employment tests were created by Dr. Adam Grant, the top-rated professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for 7 consecutive years. Dr. Grant has been recognized as one of HR’s most influential international thinkers, the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers, and is on the Forbes’ list of the world’s most influential business thinkers.
Dr. Grant’s research focuses on generosity, motivation and meaningful work, championing new ideas, personality traits like introversion-extraversion, leadership, collaboration, culture, and organizational change. Dr. Grant is best known for his research on “helping motivation,” which is a trait exhibited by people who are generous with their time, resources and knowledge and are motivated to do their work by how much it will help others. People with high helping motivation tendencies create a more productive and collaborative work environment - they are more likely to help their co-workers as well as customers and people who might be in need of that company’s product or service. Helping motivation is one of the nine traits that the Optimize Hire Talent Assessment tests.
Dr. Grant is also the creator of the Optimize Hire Talent Assessment. When contracted by a North Carolina company to help them reduce turnover, Dr. Grant combined decades of psychological research from across industrial and organizational psychology literature to create what would become the Optimize Hire Pre Employment Test. Then, as our Wharton research partners do now, Dr. Grant conducted a validation study by asking several hundred current employees to take our pre-employment test and gathering their job performance data (e.g. sales revenues, supervisor ratings, etc). The results of his study showed that high scores on that pre employment test were statistically significant predictors of turnover. Because of the amazing results of that study, Dr. Grant and our Managing Director, Dane Barnes, created Optimize Hire with the goal of helping organizations and companies improve hiring decisions.
According to his profile on the Wharton School of Management’s website, Dr. Grant is the author and co-author of 3 New York Times best-selling books Give and Take, Originals and Option B (co-written with Sheryl Sandberg). He has appeared twice on the Today Show and was profiled in the New York Times Magazine cover story, “Is giving the secret to getting ahead?“ Dr. Grant’s studies have been highlighted in best-selling books including David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell as well as in hundreds of media outlets including: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Time Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, CNN, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and The Financial Times.
Dr. Grant’s speaking and consulting clients include Google, the NFL, Merck, Pixar, Goldman Sachs, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the U.S. Department of State, Facebook, Estée Lauder, Apple, MTV, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, JP Morgan, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Nickelodeon, and the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy.