About the Authors
Jane Allen
Jane Allen is the Founder and CEO of Smart Work Assessments and the Global Master Distributor of the POP™ (Predictor of Potential) Assessment System. For more than four decades, she has helped business owners and executives make better hiring, leadership, and talent development decisions.
As Founder and CEO of Smart Work Network for 25 years, Jane led hundreds of executive and sales leadership searches for entrepreneurial and mid-sized organizations. Through decades of identifying, interviewing, assessing, and placing high-performing leaders, she developed The Science & Art of Selection—an evidence-based process that integrates Ideal Candidate Profiling, structured behavioral interviewing, and predictive talent assessment to identify candidates who are naturally aligned with the demands of the role.
Today, Jane helps organizations implement predictive selection systems that improve hiring accuracy, strengthen leadership pipelines, reduce turnover, and identify people with the natural capacity to thrive.
Jane is the co-author, with Dr. John Marshall, of Anti-Fragile Talent: People Hardwired to Thrive, a practical guide that combines predictive science with proven talent selection and leadership practices to help organizations identify, develop, and retain people who are naturally wired to succeed.
Early in her career, Jane worked with leadership pioneer Dr. Stephen R. Covey, whose principles of responsibility, accountability, and self-management profoundly shaped her leadership philosophy. Those principles later aligned with the predictive research of Dr. John Marshall, providing the scientific foundation for measuring these qualities before organizations hire, promote, or develop people.
John Marshall, Ph.D.
Dr. John Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Self Management Group (SMG), a Toronto-based talent analytics and performance consulting firm. An organizational psychologist, author, researcher, and keynote speaker, he has spent more than four decades helping organizations build high-performance, self-managed cultures.
Dr. John Marshall is the creator of the POP™ Assessment Suite and the pioneering science behind its predictive methodology. Over more than four decades, his research has fundamentally advanced the ability to predict who is naturally likely to succeed, persist, and thrive in specific roles before organizations make hiring, promotion, or development decisions.
Used by more than 3,500 organizations and available in over 40 languages, the POP™ assessments measure the natural capacities, motivational drivers, and learned behaviors that predict performance potential and long-term success across a wide range of roles.
His research has produced thousands of predictive validation studies and established one of the world’s most comprehensive databases linking human potential to workplace performance. The science underlying the POP™ Assessment Suite serves as the foundation for the principles and practical applications presented throughout this book.