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Know Your Strengths

A Representative’s Perspective: How PDP Global Elevated My Consulting Business
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KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS

Phil Olsen, a highly-regarded business consultant with over 22 years of experience with PDP, was already well-established in the consulting field when he considered partnering with PDP Global. As the President of Know Your Strengths, a consultancy focused on matching talents with tasks, Phil had tried several assessment tools but felt they lacked precision, accuracy, and adaptability. That’s when PDP Global came into the picture and changed everything for him.

Company Overview

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President: Phil Olsen, CDMP, SPHR

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Founded in: 2002

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Years Using PDP: 22

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Service Area: US & International

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Client Industries: Construction & Development, Medical Device, Non-Profit, Academia, Business/HR Consultants

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Services: Talent discovery, job modeling, recruiting, hiring, training, motivating, managing, and retention.

Instruments Used

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ProScan®

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TeamScan®

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JobScan®

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Number of Certified Users

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The Challenge

  • Generic Behavioral Assessment Results
  • Hiring Mismatches When Relying on Instincts
  • Single-Usage Assessments vs. Ongoing Utilization

Before using PDP’s suite of instruments, Know Your Strengths primarily relied on its own knowledge, relevant work experience,  intuition, and traditional assessments like DiSC, but encountered significant limitations using this approach.

Too often, candidates whose credentials seemed perfect on paper or who exhibited similar traits to their interviewers were hired based on intuition and with partial reliance on assessment results. Over time, however, there were simply too many mismatches made. Phil then discovered that DiSC is not a statistically-validated assessment for use in hiring, and he was disappointed by the fact that the results weren't that accurate to begin with. He discovered that people could easily manipulate the DISC system with their answers, which also limited its reliability and accuracy.

DiSC’s results provided a limited range of individual categorizations, which Phil felt were too broad and failed to capture the unique nuances of each individual. Participants in team-building events commonly pointed out how different everyone was within the same DISC profile groups. Plus, Phil learned that DiSC was meant to only be used for a singular event rather than being used on an ongoing basis.

The Solution

  • PDP Global's Precision and Accuracy
  • Multi-Layered Report Insights
  • Tailored Assessment Results
  • Global Use - Translations into 21 Languages

When PDP Global initially approached Phil, he was skeptical. After taking the PDP ProScan Survey and experiencing its in-depth analysis firsthand, however, his perspective changed. Phil recalled his first observation about his ProScan consultation with Bruce M. Hubby, the founder of PDP Global:

“During the consultation on my ProScan results, Bruce told me things about myself that no one could have ever known, some of those things I didn't even realize about myself until then. I remember asking Bruce a lot of really tough questions, because I had to know, where did PDP get this information about me and how were they able to get it? Did they just stumble on it? Did they call my wife? Did they call my mother?"

PDP's ability to reveal his natural strengths, behaviors, and motivations from a short 10-minute survey absolutely blew Phil away.

What really set PDP apart for Phil was how ProScan provided an unprecedented level of accurate insights into a person’s natural behavioral traits, which would subsequently enable Phil and his KYS team to make much more informed decisions about people:

“PDP is sensitive enough to pick up the subtle differences in every person's profile and it won’t allow a person to “game the system” to achieve a desired result. I love the fact that the ProScan helps us to understand the uniqueness of every person and it doesn't try to put them in a pre-determined box. It also helps each person to understand that who they are is not only OK, it’s Great!.”

Phil has also been struck by the openness of the PDPGlobal team to receive constructive input through the years. As a result, PDP has continued to build a series of robust analysis features, tools, and resources into its PDPWorks integrated management system. One such example is PDP’s recent release of the Side-by-Side report:

“The ProScan Side-by-Side Report is fantastic. It takes the profiles of two people and overlays them on top of each other on a trait intensity chart so that you can easily see how two people can work best together and where they’re going to bang heads. This has been one of the most powerful new reports that PDP has generated in recent years. KYS uses it very effectively with managers all over the country. We find that most managers want a Side-by-Side Report completed on each of their direct reports.”

“TeamScan is another powerful tool in PDPworks’ suite of assessments. It provides KYS with the ability to help teams understand the uniqueness of the dynamics that exist within their team. TeamScan helps the members of a team to understand the differences in leadership styles, communication styles, and backup styles. It provides insight into what happens to people when they're under stress and pressure. It also helps a team to understand how each member of the team processes information and makes decisions as well as what motivates and demotivates them. In addition, the results provide insight into each person’s energy style and the level of kinetic energy – the size of a person's gas tank.”

The ProScan Survey is available in 21 different languages, including French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, German, Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian. Know Your Strengths has successfully administered the ProScan and conducted consultations in multiple languages with people worldwide. The accuracy of the ProScan has consistently impressed everyone it touches, regardless of their language or their cultural context.

“It is rewarding for us to see how organizations here in the US and around the world are benefitting from the utilization of PDP’s proven people management system.”

The Impact: Exceeding Expectations Every Time

Phil has now conducted over 4,000 one-on-one consultations using PDP’s instruments and continues to use them with KYS clients in the US and globally. He says, “In the 22 years that I've been using PDP, we simply haven't lost clients to other assessments. Once they start using ProScan, JobScan, and TeamScan, they don't want to use anything else.”

With PDP, Phil can now:

  • Tailor solutions to each individual: With 98% accuracy, ProScan delivers specific insights unique to each person, which helps enable each person to achieve success in their roles. PDP also helps people understand how to recognize, appreciate, and respect the strengths of others.
  • Streamline hiring processes: JobScan’s job modeling and matching capabilities ensure that the right talent is matched with the right task, drastically improving hiring outcomes.
  • Foster cultural transformation: Phil credits PDP with helping organizations transform their internal culture by giving employees a deep understanding of who they are and how they work best.

Why PDP Works: The Key to Consistent Success

You can’t truly help people until you understand who they are and Phil describes PDP as a system that does “90% of the heavy lifting.” The accuracy of the results enables consultants to focus on applying their expertise where it matters the most. The instruments not only offer elegant and profound simplicity—as Dr. Bonnie D. Bass, PDP’s VP of Research & Development, once described the ProScan Survey—but they also foster long-term client loyalty.

“You don't have to have a PhD in behavioral psychology to utilize ProScan, JobScan, and TeamScan because the reports do the vast majority of the heavy lifting. A lot of times, people buy into a franchise, company, or system only to then find out that they’re out on a limb all by themselves without any support, and they ultimately fail. PDP’s integrated management system, on the other hand, provides the vast majority of the resources that are necessary for a PDP Professional to achieve success."

Client Success: Cultural Transformation

“One of the things that I've been most amazed at is the impact that ProScan, JobScan, and TeamScan have on the transformation of a company’s culture. And, during the course of my last 22 plus years with PDP, helping companies achieve cultural transformation is one of the things that I am most proud of.”

As an example, Know Your Strengths recently supported an organization in Mongolia with the successful hiring of an executive director and an assistant executive director for the entire country. The project involved administering ProScans to 12 candidates in multiple languages, providing consultations, and coaching the organization through the screening, hiring, and onboarding process. Now, two years after those hires, both executives continue to excel in their roles, demonstrating the accuracy and effectiveness of PDP ProScan across different languages and within different cultural contexts.

Interested in the Power of PDP?

Phil summarized his comments about PDP by saying:

ProScan, JobScan, and TeamScan will exceed your expectations. We can't say that about very many things these days, but I can make that statement with 100% confidence because I've seen it happen over and over and over and over again.”

Phil’s Know Your Strengths story is a testament to the power of PDP Global’s assessment instruments and the impact they can have on a person’s consulting business. Whether you’re focused on talent discovery, executive development, or team dynamics, PDP offers the precision and flexibility you’ll need to grow your business as you help your clients thrive.

The Results

Increase in Retention
Reduction in Turnover Costs
Turnover During Peak Season

All-Time High Retention

HPOne’s retention skyrocketed by 20% to a staggering 80% rate after using the PDP People Management System to make the right hires from the start and intervene with employees close to quitting to support them. Of the 6% of the workforce identified as close to burning out during peak season, managers successfully intervened to retain every single one of them, contributing to a total 50% reduction in turnover costs.

Confident and Streamlined Hiring

Because recruiters could utilize PDP JobScan models to make informed hiring decisions, HPOne knew a 70% candidate match or higher would succeed in the role and perform well under the stress of the busy period. The Hiring Manager no longer needed to interview and give final approval for each of their 1,100 hires. When retroactively analyzing profiles of low performers hired before PDP Global was incorporated into the hiring process, HPOne determined that 75% wouldn’t have been hired in the first place had PDP job modeling been used.

Consistent Company Culture

HPOne’s company culture has always felt like being part of a family. But when Covid hit and that family shifted to remote working, it was harder to maintain that sentiment since employees weren’t experiencing the office community. PDP Global empowered the culture to grow in new ways, encouraging meaningful engagement from leaders and employees unique to their behavioral preferences. Colleagues attest that the culture still feels like a family: a fun environment with high integrity and accountability.

Leadership and Management Style Shift

Instead of leading and managing based on something “wrong” with an employee, the PDP People Management System shifted HealthPlanOne’s coaching perspective to capitalize and grow an employee’s strengths. Only after knowing someone’s strengths through ProScan can that individual be placed in opportunities to naturally succeed. HPOne used this behavioral knowledge to create small wins by giving certain tasks to individuals who genuinely enjoy doing them rather than someone who wouldn’t. Leaders appreciated hiring people who were not exactly like them because it created a more well-rounded team and released the pressure they often felt to be good at everything.

Moreover, HPOne’s HR department quickly realized that most complaints stemmed from simple miscommunication between people with different behavioral traits. ProScan equipped leaders and managers to conduct crucial conversations more effectively than before with insights into likes, dislikes, motivators, preferred communication methods, and logic styles.

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