The résumé and the references tell you what someone has done. The interview tells you what they want you to hear. Six weeks into peak season you still learn the hard way whether they will stay on a repetitive crew, make a call without texting you every hour, or grind on a job that never fits how they are wired. Hiring on gut alone is expensive when the season is short and the crew is small.
This article is from Behavioral Reports and Employees with Predictive Success, episode 250 of the How to Hardscape Podcast, published March 18, 2024. Michael Pletz hosted. Jason Taylor is the principal of Predictive Success and president of Jet Coaching and Consulting. Predictive Success offers the Predictive Index talent optimization platform, and the conversation centers on the Predictive Index behavioral assessment: two questions, a set of word checkboxes, and a behavioral report.
People Problems Hide Off the P&L
Jason’s pitch starts with a blunt claim: whatever keeps an owner awake at night usually drills down to a person. Labor shows up as a black-and-white line. Productivity, retention, turnover, engagement, and culture do not. Those invisible lines, he said, still cost companies tens of thousands of dollars, and when they improve, the bottom line gets more robust without anyone being able to point at a single invoice that caused it.
His working formula is retention up and turnover down, which drives productivity, which fuels engagement, which fuels culture, which has a direct line into the bottom line. Companies with strong culture, in his words, do not get lucky. They work at it. The same formula applies whether you have three people or thirty thousand.
He came into the work after sales leadership at Labatt Breweries of Canada, other beverage roles, and helping bring Firehouse Subs to Canada. Meeting David Leahy, founder of Predictive Success, and taking the assessment himself is what sold him. Two questions and a word list produced a read that felt deeper than what some of his family knew. From Whitby, Ontario, he now coaches and speaks across industries, including landscape construction, with a personal line he repeats: better work, better world, meaning the day does not feel like a grind when the person’s behaviors match the work.
Two Questions, Three Graphs, the Whole Person
The assessment asks, in his framing, how you think you behave and how you think others want you to behave. You check the words that apply. Michael said his own run took about five or six minutes. From that, Jason gets three graphs.
Self is the hardwiring he calls DNA: how you behave about 95 percent of the time. Self concept is a roughly 90- to 120-day rear-view look at how you are flexing under whatever life and work are throwing at you. That graph moves. Birth, death, a new boss, a boom, a slowdown. Synthesis is observable behavior, a mathematical average of the top two charts. If you hire or promote someone tomorrow, that synthesis is who you get for about the next three months.
He separates the hire into three parts. The briefcase is education, skills, references, and past experience. Conversation shows heart, values, and interests. Behavioral and cognitive drives come from the assessment. Put together, that is what he calls hiring the whole person, or a golden-gut decision backed by data instead of a guess after a good interview.
The report also measures four drives he labeled A through D: dominance (how you like to lead and generate ideas), extroversion (how you connect and want to be connected with), patience (how your world needs to be structured so you stay and produce), and formality (how precise or flexible you are). An E-score describes the basis of judgment you use on a real business decision. There are seventeen possible profiles in four buckets: social, stabilizing, persistent, and analytical. Michael came back as an Operator in the stabilizing bucket. Jason walked that report live on the episode so listeners could hear what a readback sounds like; the YouTube version shows the graphs. The point for a contractor is not Michael’s profile. It is that a short checklist produces a management playbook: stability, clear definitions of success by quarter, thorough training, consistent process, and room to teach and mentor, because Operators hate a process that changes every week.
Assess Before You Hire, on Every Role
Jason said he does not hire without a Predictive Index. He treats it as a key to entry, not a paperwork step after the offer. Timing inside the funnel is flexible. On a high-volume role with a flood of applicants, send assessments early and short-list to the behavior you need. Or run first interviews, then assess the twenty people you still like. Either way, he wants the report before the person is on the truck.
He pushes back on saving the tool for “higher” roles. Every role has behaviors, from crew member and laborer to CEO. The owner’s job is to know what behaviors that role needs, then match the person to the job. He uses the same approach in landscape companies, factories, warehouses, and retail.
A separate role assessment takes about ten minutes. You get a link named for the job, for example foreman. You check only the statements that belong to that role. The platform builds a behavioral framework for the role, overlays the person’s behaviors, and shows fits and gaps. The question he wants answered is not only whether they can do the job. It is whether they will do that job day after day, week after week, year after year. Can and will are different, and will is what protects retention.
For seasonal or short stays, he still wants the report. Even two or three months is long enough to ask how productive they will be, how to coach them while you have them, whether you would bring them back, and whether they have a leadership lane later. He would rather turn transient work into stickier work than treat every summer hire as disposable.
Pair the Crew Before the Conflict Starts
Two platform tools speak directly to small hardscape crews.
The relationship guide plugs two people in. Within about ten seconds he gets strengths of the relationship, caution areas based on who they are, and recommendations so the relationship thrives. Self-awareness cuts arguments over small stuff when both people already know how the other is wired.
Team Dynamics is the piece he called most popular. Assessed people go into a pie with four quadrants: teamwork and employee experience, innovation and agility, results and discipline, and process and precision. Where someone sits shows the strength they bring. A whole crew on the pie shows how they will work together, what to double down on, and the blind spots to handle before they become midnight stress.
He sketched each slice. Teamwork and employee experience is culture, harmony, brainstorming out loud, and resolving conflict by focusing on the people. Innovation and agility takes risks, tries new things, and looks for different revenue or efficiency. Results and discipline is goal achievement, short communication, and whether the work is making money; those are the people who answer a long text with yes or no and are not mad at you. Process and precision is organization and efficiency, the glue. When innovation wants it next week, process says maybe next month and wants steps. Results and process people ask where we are going and who will get us there. Teamwork and innovation ask who is on the team and where we are going. Both strategies are valid. Balance makes better decisions than a crew that thinks the same way.
He told a landscape client story without naming them. Looking at current crews, he asked permission to guess which crew took the longest and frustrated the owner most. He picked the collaborative crew that had nobody who made a decision, so every call bounced to the owner. They remixed the crews. Instead of one crew finishing about four jobs in a day while another finished about one, the slower crews moved toward two and three. The profiles made the bottleneck visible before another season of the same pattern.
Map Champions, Grinders, Contaminators, and Silent Killers
Separate from the Team Dynamics pie, Jason uses a four-quadrant map every company has.
Cultural champions are high engagement and high performance. That is the target. Grinders are low engagement and high performance: they may not drink the company Kool-Aid, but the work gets done on time and they matter. Contaminators are low engagement and low performance. He compares them to cancer on the team: cut them out so they do not spread. Silent killers are high engagement and low performance. Shops keep them because they love everything the company says. Suggest spending five million dollars and they cheer. They cause no argument, so owners miss that the performance is not there. Coach them toward performance if you can. If you cannot, they still need to leave.
He believes in coaching to performance, and he is blunt about where the hours go. Like attracts like. A players want to be around A players and they want coaching too. Pouring all the energy into turning a D into an A burns the coach and tells the A player they are invisible. When he walks into a company he has owners draw four squares and list people. Coach cultural champions first; a little more coaching there pays off hard. Raise engagement on grinders next. Work silent killers on performance third. Contaminators get the basics, and if it does not stick he will not spend the day protecting the rest of the organization around someone who will not get on board.
He said every business he enters has at least one silent killer. Sometimes a few, sometimes many. Owners are often surprised when they map the grid: they love the person, and he agrees, then he puts the performance next to the affection. Awareness first. Fire is not the opening move. Getting the person to a better place is, if performance can move.
True self-awareness, as he defined it, is not only knowing how you behave. It is knowing how your behavior affects the other person, then adjusting the message so it still says what it needs to say and actually lands. Ask friends if they are self-aware and they will all say yes. The second half of the definition is the part most people skip.
What Changed When Companies Hired to the Pattern
He shared two client results from that conversation. A large retailer had shrinking basket size. They mapped who greets, helps, and suggests, assessed the role, and found people in the wrong seats who still fit elsewhere in the company. New hires were matched to a social, engaging profile with urgency and enough detail to listen. In test locations that hired only to that profile, basket size rose about 27 percent on average.
A manufacturer already used the tool for management and director roles but not for stocking and moving work. That labor role held the largest share of turnover. Students and summer applicants flooded it. Filtering for patience and the ability to stay with mundane work for eight hours improved retention by about 4.3 percent. In a large company, he called that massive dollars.
Pricing, as he described it, is a subscription based on company size, with unlimited assessments so owners stop hoarding tests and assess everyone inside and everyone coming in. He did not put a dollar price on that subscription in the episode. Strategy gets business results through people; hire better, inspire better, design teams better, coach better, and get more self-aware as a leader, and you reach the results with less pain. He argued the data saves time because you stop guessing why someone acts the way they do.
For a free role assessment and a readback of your own assessment, he offered email to jtaylor@predictivesuccess.com, and to mention Michael’s podcast or How to Hardscape so he knows the source. Hear the full conversation, including Michael’s live Operator readback, before you copy any figure into your hiring process: Behavioral Reports and Employees with Predictive Success.