How Psychometrics Can Revolutionize Your Workforce With Jason P. Carroll

Jason P. Carroll is the Founder and CEO of Aptive Index, a company revolutionizing hiring and leadership through psychometric assessments and strategic advisory. As a seasoned entrepreneur, he successfully led Champion National Security from $24 million to $80 million in revenue and expanded its workforce from 800 to 2,500 employees in just seven years, culminating in a successful acquisition. Additionally, Jason is a trained leadership consultant, utilizing his expertise to enhance team performance and company culture. He focuses on people-centric strategies paired with technological innovation to help companies grow.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:16] Jason P. Carroll discusses how Aptive Index helps leaders gain valuable insights into their behavior and its impact on others

• [3:00] The three levers that unlock deeper self-awareness

• [11:04] The vital role of a robust value system in driving the desire for self-improvement and growth

• [13:02] Jason explains how Aptive Index scientifically measures hardwired conative attributes

• [16:24] How Aptive Index can improve corporate hiring, leadership, and team dynamics

• [21:32] Practical application of Aptive Index

• [26:54] How Aptive Index optimizes hiring with psychometric assessments
  

In this episode…

In today's fast-paced business world, understanding the strengths and motivations of each team member can be the difference between success and stagnation. How can leaders place their employees in roles where they can excel and stay motivated? Additionally, how can companies leverage self-awareness to foster better communication and improved performance?

Jason P. Carroll, a visionary entrepreneur, delves into psychometric assessments and how they can revolutionize how people perceive hiring, leadership, and personal growth. He introduces the Aptive Index, a tool that measures innate drives and behaviors, facilitating optimal job placement and team dynamics. He shares his transformation and the crucial role of self-awareness in altering behaviors and the workplace atmosphere. By examining specific traits like pro-social behavior and sociability, Jason offers insights into how understanding these aspects can drastically help you minimize conflict and improve team performance.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Jason P. Carroll, Founder and CEO of Aptive Index, about revolutionizing hiring and leadership through psychometric assessments. Jason discusses how Aptive Index helps leaders gain valuable insights into their behavior and its impact on others, the three levers that unlock deeper self-awareness, and how Aptive Index can improve corporate hiring, leadership, and team dynamics.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik! 

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn  

• Jason P. Carroll on LinkedIn  

• Aptive Index

• It's My Life! I Can Change If I Want To by Richard Walker  

• "Embrace Technology: Gain a Competitive Edge in Wealth Management With Jeff Schwantz" on The Customer Wins 

• "Creating Financial Health With Abby Morton" on The Customer Wins 

• "Scaling Communities and Operations Excellence for RIAs With Shaun Kapusinski" on The Customer Wins
  

Quotable Moments:

• "Self-awareness is far deeper than what we tend to think it is; data is kind of the first lever."

• "Identity statements do not give us an inflection point for change."

• "I think it starts with the leaders who embrace the data we're giving them for themselves selfishly first, to really kind of transform their behaviors."

• "Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I'm going to obsess over culture now."

• "We are going to be more fulfilled in certain roles where we get to fulfill those drives and those needs more naturally."
  

Action Steps:

1. Take a psychometric assessment: Engage with tools like Aptive Index to gain deep insights into your conative attributes, helping you understand your innate drives and behaviors.

2. Reflect on the impact of your actions: Assessing how your behaviors impact others can foster empathy and motivate positive change in interpersonal dynamics.

3. Openly communicate differences: Understanding and discussing different communication styles leads to effective conflict resolution and strengthens team cohesiveness.

4. Integrate data into leadership strategies: Use psychometric data to inform hiring decisions, ensuring team members are well-suited and more likely to be satisfied and successful in their roles.

5. Prioritize a value system for growth: Establish and foster a culture that values self-improvement and growth, as it is essential for motivating individuals to engage in self-discovery and development.
   

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.

Richard Walker 0:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Jeff Schwantz of Advisor360 Abby Morton of Elements, and Shaun Kapusinski of HIFON. Today, I'm speaking with Jason P. Carroll, founder of Aptive Index, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms, instead, get Quik! Using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started.

All right. Jason P. Carroll is a visionary entrepreneur and the founder of Aptive Index, a company revolutionizing hiring and leadership through psychometric assessments and strategic advisory. With a remarkable track record of scaling businesses. Jason previously, led champion national security from 24 million to 80 million in revenue, and grew its workforce from 800 to 2500 employees in just seven years, culminating in a successful acquisition. A seasoned startup veteran and a leadership consultant trained by Dr. Brene Brown, Jason's career is defined by his commitment to people-centric strategies and technological innovation. Jason, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Jason P. Carroll 1:53 

Hey, thanks so much for having me Rich. I'm excited.

Richard Walker 1:56 

Yeah, I am too. You've got a lot to share with us today. So for those who haven't heard this podcast, before I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Jason, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Jason P. Carroll 2:16 

Well, thank you for that question. Aptive Index helps people by giving them profound self-awareness. And I can go into that in more detail if you want. There's a byproduct of insane ROI and putting the right people in the right seats, but I really think it starts with the leaders who embrace the data that we're giving them for themselves selfishly first, to really kind of transform their behaviors with a deeper understanding of what makes them.

Richard Walker 2:45 

Wow. Okay, profound self-awareness. Now, I mean, that's a tough thing just to figure out in the first place, what makes somebody self-aware. How are you helping people become more self-aware so they can be better versions of themselves?

Jason P. Carroll 3:00 

Well, it's okay. I'll back up a little bit. I have a giant Phoenix tattoo comes all the way across my chest, over my shoulder, down my rib cage. Ouch, by the way. It represents what Phoenix is representing, rising new life from ashes. And from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021, like a two year span, I had five like life altering, life shaking events, and I previously thought I was self-aware. This really shook me. I thought I knew my identity, and it all got flipped on its head, and so I set out on a personal journey to take some of the knowledge that I already had about behavioral psychology, about leadership and about myself and the world, even though much of it had been flipped upside down, to really just go introspective self-discovery, COVID Shut Down help with that. Right?

I had no friends or community and couldn't go outdoors. And so what I discovered was that self-awareness is far deeper than what we tend to think it is. Data is kind of the first lever. There's three levers. The first is data, and that's what we all think of as self-awareness, right? Just observing a behavior recognizing that it exists. But the second layer is when it goes deep, and it goes much deeper, much faster, and its impact, data impact. The impact is like, how are my behaviors affecting impacting the people around me? So my example that I like to point to is that I tend to dominate meetings. I've been the guy in charge for a decade and a half. I have an assertive personality, so I would dominate meetings. That's data, right? That doesn't really do anything.

I can put it on the spreadsheet, but it's not moving the needle. The impact, what I realized was that I was causing people on my team to feel like they didn't have a voice. People felt like I didn't value their ideas, their contributions. That's when, like the knife went in, and it is twisted right. So that lever of self-awareness was, I mean, like I said, way deeper real quick, and now I had motivation to change the behaviors that I didn't like anymore. And the third lever, oftentimes we get really close, we ask, why, like, why do I do what I do? Why do you do what you Why does anybody do what they do? And that's close, okay, but there's an inherent problem with the question of why. Oftentimes the answer is an answer that's an identity statement and sometimes rooted in shame, like, why do I bulldoze meetings? Well, because I'm a jerk, because I'm arrogant, because I'm a bad leader.

I mean, we've told ourselves. Everybody's told themselves stories like that, right? And the problem with that is, if I am bad, well, I guess I just accept that I am bad, and then there's no inflection point for change, right? So identity statements do not give us an inflection point for change, but we were close. So what we really need to ask the third lever is drives, what? Not why? What drives my behaviors? And I know I'm talking a lot, but I'm so passionate about this, there's something called conative psychology traits. We all know cognitive, right, that intelligence and things like that. Conative, if you type it into your device, it'll put regular squiggly lines underneath. It's a word, I promise. Go look it up. I've never heard of it. Yeah, so infrequently used that it's, you know, our devices want to tell us we've met something else. Okay, but these are the drivers, like innate within us. Instinct drives volition that inform our behavior, because what we're doing if we're fulfilling needs. So one example of a conative attribute is influence. Not am I influential, but do I need to influence people, events, outcomes?

And for me, the answer is a skyrocketing yes, right? My biggest driver, and so I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to influence impact, et cetera. That was driving a behavior of being dominating in meetings. Well that's not the only behavior that might result to meet that need. So just realizing that I was like, oh, well, let me just pick a better behavior, like, instead of needing to be right, I just need to get it right, and I'm not going to be the one with the best ideas all the time. So now let me do behaviors that are pro-social and actually raise the collective intelligence of my team instead of lowering it. And now I get all the best ideas on the table instead of just Jason's ideas. And now our outcomes are far better than they would have been if I was the one in charge. And guess what? I'm still meeting the exact same need, same drive, but I reframe the behavior, and so that's the gift I gave myself in this research. And ultimately, that's what Aptive Index measures, is these conative attributes.

And so therefore, really can give that gift to other leaders, and then by byproduct is we can measure it in all of our employees. Now we can put the right people in the right seats. We know how to lead them better. We know how to communicate with them better. We know what motivates them. So, yeah, long answer, but it's not like there's passion.

Richard Walker 8:29 

There's so much in there. I don't know if you know this, and this is why you and I are going to be good friends for a long time. I wrote a book called It's My Life, I Can Change If I want To. I published it in 2011 it's a four-step method of how to change. And what you just talked about is a lot of what I talk about in my book, which I want to go back to, this question, why? So what I talk about my book is you have to believe you can change. You have to want to change, and I mean a motivational desire to change. But the third thing is, you have to understand and discover what core belief is driving your current behavior like you're talking about as conative these drivers. I distill it down to what is the belief that actually formed that is causing you to push this way?

And step four is then to change that belief to something more positive, more empowering. But how do you get to step three? How do you figure out what the belief is? And one of the things I talk about then is you should look at your behavior and ask questions about it. When does it happen? Who does it impact, benefit, hurt, etc. Where does it happen? How does it happen? How is it manifesting all those things? But the one thing I also say is, don't ask why, really, how you said it better, because I've always said why. Here's the thing that's magical your brain is a computer that can answer any question you give it. I don't know if it's the right answer. That's a whole different aspect, right?

Jason P. Carroll 9:47 

It always will answer it too.

Richard Walker 9:49 

It will always answer you Yes. So here's the problem, if you give it a why question, its answers are typically destructive, not constructive. Why can't I lose weight? Because you're lazy. Why can't I make more money because you don't work hard enough? It doesn't help you. It gives you these really strange answers with some rare aspects where it can help you. But I say it's a danger question to ask, so I find that really funny, that you're talking about that too.

Jason P. Carroll 10:15 

Your listeners are going to think we staged that. Yeah, haven't read the book. I want to now for sure, but yeah, wow, that's amazing.

Richard Walker 10:24 

Yeah, I'll get you a copy so we can talk even more about this. But so no wonder I like all this, because really, there's some other things that you said in what your answer was, and I don't want you to gloss over it, the self-awareness. You said data, it was impact and it was driver? Is that drives? Yep, drives, impact, drives. But here's what I'm also seeing, Jason, because you looked at the data and you assessed the impact, and then you started to understand what's driving it. That's what formed your self-awareness, which was the ability to see yourself and change yourself. Would you say that's a fair way to look at self-awareness?

Jason P. Carroll 11:04 

It is. And you know what self-awareness is hard because we have to be introspective. We have to look at behaviors and realize that sometimes they are negative impacting behaviors. And it's hard because whether we said it out loud or not, we do wonder why. And like you said, our brain gives us an answer, but we have to complete that circuit, and if we don't get past that initial discomfort, then the circuit's completed with those negative self-views.

Richard Walker 11:36 

So this is actually really important to me. I don't know if the listeners will care or not. But this is important to me, because I've always thought of there's a class of people who are self-aware and a class of people who I don't think are self-aware. And that's not perfectly true. You're self-aware about some things, but not other things. So I don't mean to give it this black-and-white statement, but to say that you're self-aware, somebody tends to be introspective. They tend to see themselves. They tend to care about how others see themselves, and others that don't, you just don't, maybe see them as self-aware, perhaps. But I think you gave it a finer depth, a finer detail to it, which is, it's not just looking at yourself. It's having the ability to accept that truth about yourself and then have the skills or the technology or the techniques to change yourself?

Jason P. Carroll 12:25 

Yeah.

Richard Walker 12:27 

Go ahead.

Jason P. Carroll 12:28 

Well, you mentioned something in your book, and as you're talking about your book, the values, I didn't mention that in this framework, probably because I think it's an assumption that if there's not a value system for self-improvement and growth, you're not going to be interested in this anyways, right? So, I'm kind of assuming that there's a value system somewhere deep inside that's going to be pushing you to try to self-discover but that's actually not a very good assumption, because not a lot of people have that. Everyone has that.

Richard Walker 13:02 

Yeah, but you're let's go back to your product, because after the index it so just to be honest with everybody, I took it before this call because I wanted to see what it was like, and it's comparable to other types of behavioral studies or surveys that you might do. I don't know which ones you want to compare it to, but you go through a series of questions or answers or reactions to things, and it comes back with this kind of, I wouldn't call it a score. It's an assessment.

Jason P. Carroll 13:29 

There's a chart, and there's some profiles and things like that.

Richard Walker 13:32 

Yeah. So why don't you describe it better than me? It's your product.

Jason P. Carroll 13:35 

Sure. Yeah. So what we're primarily trying to measure are these cognitive attributes. A lot of the assessments out there are personality-based, and they're very helpful, they're informative, etc, but personality is how we move through the world, as an adaptation to what the world demands, right? These cognitive drivers, they're there regardless of what you see, and they've kind of been baked into us since our teens. They'll fluctuate a little bit because of neuroplasticity, but they're not changing the way personality and habits change. We can rewire neural pathways with a lot of intentionality, but the drivers aren't really being affected a lot. And so what sets this apart from personality is that cognitive attribute measurement, and there's a job title you probably never heard of, psychometrician.

I have a psychometrician staff who's a whole degree and study is how to validate psychometric assessments, right? So we put it through this grueling assessment of factor analysis and comfort or desirability bias, and there's a KMO and a Bartlett test. There's all these tests we've run it through. And so this is actually a scientifically validated this isn't just like a, oh, neat. I'm an Enneagram eight or whatever, right? And again, those are not dogging those things are really helpful. Cliftonstrengths is one of my favorites, right? Your top five are going to change over time, but they're really informative. And the whole philosophy is, lean into your strengths, right? We're peeling back the onion layers a little more than that.

Richard Walker 15:17 

Yeah. I look it is actually magical, what you've come up with. And it's always strange for me to go through these assessments, because you're like, these questions or these things are going to help you understand me. It's so weird because...

Jason P. Carroll 15:32 

Yeah, it takes people seven minutes tops. It's usually five to seven minutes to take the assessment. And then when I sit down with them, they feel like I'm peering into their soul. I just had a text message from an old friend of mine yesterday who was like, if I wasn't prepared for this, if I didn't know you, I would burn you at the stake and call you a witch. Like, this was creepy. So it's really fun, and it's so meaningful and again, it happens to have an insane ROI. I mean, it's like, I don't even end up talking about the business application because I'm so passionate about the information it's giving us as people who want to grow.

Richard Walker 16:09

Well, let's get to that then, because, again, part of what I like to understand is how you're helping people. How do you help that company who uses this Aptive Index to grow, to hire better to improve their leadership, their company culture. What are the impacts that you're providing?

Jason P. Carroll 16:24 

Yeah, so if you think about like the if we're talking about hard wiring, these cognitive drives, think about the drives that a really outgoing area salesperson might have. They're assertive, they're people oriented, they're quick to connect. They're not really concerned with the rules or details, right? Those aren't the things that are driving them, but there's a reason that salesperson is good at what they do, and that reason would also make them a pretty miserable accountant, most likely because now, instead of getting needs fulfilled by getting out there and connecting now they're stuck behind a computer and they're crunching numbers. They're by themselves, right? So, totally different environments. And the point of that illustration is that we are going to be more fulfilled in certain roles where we get to fulfill those drives and those needs more naturally.

Now we are flexible. We can always adapt to our situation, but the more we have to adapt, the more energy it requires. And if we're thinking about a rubber band being stretched, if you stretch it too hard and for too long, it's going to snap. And you talk to people that are like, I'm burnt out. A lot of times, what's happening well, a lot of times they're just, they have no intrinsic motivation because their company sucks. But a lot of times. What's happening is they're exerting so much energy having to operate outside of their hard wiring that they just been stretched too long, too hard. So knowing that data, let's go look at our positions that we have to fill, and let's create, I mean, I can't show you the charts, but there are these charts, and we can create ranges of where we really think people will fall into to be like an ideal fit for a certain position.

It doesn't mean that people outside of that range aren't considered. It's just that there's going to be people that more naturally flow into it, get their needs fulfilled, so therefore they're happier and they're more successful. And there are studies that directly link success in a job to these attributes. There's hundreds of them, actually.

Richard Walker 16:26 

Yeah, by the way, you just described the possible reason that many people who are exceptional as sales fail as sales managers and VPs of sales, because they went from being out in the field to managing spreadsheets and doing dashboards and not doing what they love, right,

Jason P. Carroll 18:44 

Right. Go ahead. Sorry.

Richard Walker 18:48 

Same thing happens to entrepreneurs. So many entrepreneurs start their business because they love the practice of what they're doing, and suddenly they find themselves doing HR and finance and office space leases and what, I don't get to do the work I love anymore. What happens?

Jason P. Carroll 19:01 

Every entrepreneur should hire a virtual assistant on day one, right? And then a full-time assistant when they can afford it. I mean, yeah, so one of the measurements, the one of the things we're measuring, that, to my knowledge, no one else is measuring, is an attribute called pro-social. And that's a fun one to work with. It's all one word, pro-social. And if you look that up, it's a really fascinating behavior where you are the people who are pro social raise the collective intelligence of a team, right? So because they're getting all the best ideas on the table, they're creating environments where there's psychological safety to have bad ideas, to fail, to make mistakes, and we're naturally hardwired in that way. Mine is actually kind of low on my own self-measurement.

So I have to be very intentional, because if I operate in my just, go, be independent, Jason, I am actually going to lower the collective intelligence, right? And so I have to be very intentional about that. And that attribute alone is one of the best indicators of a team leader and a manager in a company, and a highly independent salesperson isn't going to have pro-social they don't need it in order to go out and sell. So if they don't have it, and they never had to practice it and work on those coping strategies, and they're completely ill-prepared to now lead the sales team.

Richard Walker 20:25 

So in other words, you're helping give leaders insights into their people. If the people take the test or the assessment and helps them understand, would this be a good promotion or a good lateral move, or a good new role, or any even the job description? I'm actually very flexible with my job descriptions. We have job descriptions for everything, but when somebody joins the team, we look at it together and say, you write it compared to what this is. You show me what is your best. Jason, you have my permission to share my scores or talk about me, because I took this test on this show, if it helps you talk about this, because I think you said that my pro-social score was actually kind of high.

And the actual ethos of my business is to empower others to do their best work, because that's what I want for me. And I don't feel like I can do that as a dictator or a tyrant. I have to do that by really letting people work, do what they love, fail, learn, grow. And I was just saying to my team yesterday, one of the things I really love about what's happening in my company is tons and tons of decisions are being made without me. And they're good decisions. It's great.

Jason P. Carroll 21:32 

Yeah, one of the things I dig about your profile is your lowest expressed drive or need is sociability. So the need to be in social interactions and to connect with others and things like that. Now, everybody needs to connect. We have to have belonging. But that's different. It's where are you getting your energy from, right? It's almost extroversion and introversion, and that's your lowest expressed need, but your pro-social is hot. So while you're not the person that's naturally inclined to go walk by everybody's desk and say, how was your weekend? And let's go have a drink or go out to lunch, whatever that's just not.

Richard Walker 22:11 

I'd rather go to ways. I forget what anybody has. I forget people's kids.

Jason P. Carroll 22:16 

Yeah, right. You'd rather go to work, to work, right? Very task-oriented, and yet your post social is high. So you're naturally inclined to say, what are all the ideas? How do we get the collective intelligence to really drive this machine, instead of it just being Rich Walker's ideas? Yeah, so it's that's a wonderful combination to have.

Richard Walker 22:40 

You know what's interesting about that, the social driver not being there is something I question for a long time, like I've envied the sales guys, my friends, some of my best friends, have been in sales. How are you the life of the party? How is it you can connect with so many people so easily? And I had a manager back in my 20s tell me, Rich doesn't say much, but when he speaks, you better listen, because I'll only say the things that matter. I didn't know how to flourish and tell stories and to bring more to the table in terms of the conversation, and I always envied that, but I didn't have the drive to be the center of attention. It's a strange thing.

Jason P. Carroll 23:20 

Yeah, naturally, you're more introspective. Your thoughts stay up in your head, and when you say the things that you're thinking you've already processed through, and you the last thing you say what you mean, right? Yeah, I am a verbal processor, so all the crazy that might happen up in your head before you land the plane, you're just going to hear it from me. You're going to hear my crazy process, and then just, please only pay attention to the last sentence I say, because everything else was just how I got there.

Richard Walker 23:46 

You think out loud.

Jason P. Carroll 23:50 

Yeah. Think about the workplace, right? Leadership. We're talking about this one attribute. But just imagine how conflict occurs when somebody is high or somebody is low here, think about like a romantic relationship. The cosmic joke is that we always almost end up with somebody opposite us, right? So conflict happens. Somebody wants to talk it out, the other person needs space. The person who needs space is looking at the other person going, oh my gosh, you're just bullying me. You're bombarding me. Stop it. The person who wants to talk it out, it's looking at the other going, oh, you're stonewalling me. Your cold shoulder. All this, neither is true. They just need different things. So easy coping strategy to say, hey, whenever you have space to talk about this, I'd like to talk about it. Okay? So much conflicts averted by having one simple coping strategy, because you know what that need is in the other person and even yourself.

Richard Walker 24:45 

Okay, I'm not gonna be surprised if the pinnacle of your success is marriage counseling. Every new couple needs to take this Aptive Index score. I'm going to ask you a totally different question, Jason. So a lot of my listeners are in financial services, not all of them, but a lot of them, and I think a lot of customers, they serve individual customers like a financial advisor does, doctors do this, therapist, all sorts of people, right? I'm kind of curious, if you've seen where maybe a financial advisor might take this Aptive Index to their clients to ask them to do this so they would understand, work with them better, and even communicate with them better, like you're suggesting. Have you seen that? Is that a model that you think would work?

Jason P. Carroll 25:27 

That's not what I've pursued, and I like to see data first. So I love experiments. So it would be a great conversation with a financial advisor. Hey, let's go assess a handful of your clients, and you have in mind what you think about your clients and their decisions and everything else. And let's just see if any patterns emerge. And if they do now we continue forward with that data and say, All right, what does that mean? I mean certainly, though, if you understand the science getting your friends, your relatives, your clients, whoever, to take it, it's like a superpower. So people who really want to dive in and understand it use it for anything and everyone. I mean, yeah, you know, I would pay for this tool just to assess strangers I meet if I had to. Yeah, but it's an interesting use case.

Richard Walker 26:16 

Yeah, model is more corporate, right? Leaders come in and ask for this, and then ask their team leaders or team members to do it, and then they can assess it together. So that's not unlike disk or other ones out there, I suppose.

Jason P. Carroll 26:31 

Yeah, yeah. So disk, everything disk will tell you all over the website and documentation, don't use this for prescreening, because that's not what it's meant for. You can use our tool for that. That's actually one of the primary reasons it was developed and it's validated for that.

Richard Walker 26:48 

So people are putting hiring into their application process. How?

Jason P. Carroll 26:54 

So I talked about those ranges that we set for the targets. Now, when you have that position, you send out a link to all of your candidates, and as they take the assessment, I show you a percentage match, like zero to 100% how close does this person match to your ideal? Now, again, we're not going to discriminate at all just because you're not scoring 100 but it does give us a lot more information. And so if there's a, if you have 100 applicants interested in a job, wouldn't it be great to kind of weed it down, not based on some arbitrary resume that was written by AI in the first place, right? What if we narrowed down by, like, how, what? How is this person wired? How fulfilled will they be in this role? So that's how it's used on the prescreen side.

Richard Walker 27:38 

Oh, man, I love this shoot. Man, again, we could talk all day. I love this type of conversation, but I got to wrap this up at some point so.

Jason P. Carroll 27:48 

I understand. I mean, we could have talked forever when we met. We met on a boat, by the way listeners, what a funny way to meet someone.

Richard Walker 27:55 

I know. And it's funny because I don't remember your tattoo.

Jason P. Carroll 28:00 

That is funny because it's big.

Richard Walker 28:02 

No, I wasn't even thinking about that. You and I are just so engaged. All right? So before I wrap it up and I ask my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Jason P. Carroll 28:15 

Aptiveindex.com, it's a made-up word, right? It's kind of related to the conative and the ability to adapt. So it's some words smushed together, but aptiveindex.com, I'm on the internet sometimes. LinkedIn/JasonPCarroll, I think it's linkedin.com/in/jasonPCarroll to R’s, two L's, hit me up. Message me. Always willing to have interesting conversations.

Richard Walker 28:40 

Yeah, for sure, just like this. All right, we're gonna switch it up here. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Jason P. Carroll 28:50 

Man, my first kind of real job at college was the most toxic work environment I've ever been heard of, and it's all I thought was normal until I met a leader called Nicole Collins. I left that company, and I went to Dell, of all places, and I took a huge pay cut, but Nicole Collins was the head of the segment that I was in, and she was just the best people leader I ever experienced. And it was so empowering, and it was that collective intelligence was always going up, because she was getting all the best ideas, like I was somebody she promoted three times in a year and a half, even though I literally never hit my quota, because she saw that I was in the wrong role. And she started putting me in new places. I invented a new role at Dell that I piloted by myself on a row, and it succeeded.

So we built a whole team around it, and then other segments picked it up, all because she was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. Let's try it. So Nicole Collins has been a huge motivator for me in terms of like, oh, wow, culture, that's everything, culture eats strategy for breakfast. I'm going to obsess over culture now, and so really inspired me at champion, even just, some of the growth was in spite of me, made a lot of mistakes, but we got culture right. We started valuing people beyond what anything was like in that whole industry, and it disrupted it, and we exploded. Awesome.

Richard Walker 30:19 

This is one of my favorite questions to ask, because I love hearing stories like this. What would have happened if you hadn't had that kind of break, that she hadn't seen that potential and let you run with it, right?

Jason P. Carroll 30:32 

I know, I know.

Richard Walker 30:34 

Yeah, this is crazy. You don't have to, because you're here. I love what you're doing, Jason. So I want to give a big thank you to Jason P. Carroll, founder of Aptive Index, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Jason's website at aptiveindex.com and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jason P. Carroll 31:10 

Thanks Rich. It was a pleasure.

Outro 31:12 

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