The Tatnuck Group, a professional sports consulting firm that specializes in talent assessment and development, used Receptiviti to analyze the psychology of football players participating in the 2025 Senior Bowl, an all-star game where top athletes showcase their skills for potential recruitment to the National Football League (NFL).
By leveraging Receptiviti insights, the Tatnuck Group enhanced the NFL recruitment process, providing a more holistic evaluation of player potential with an innovative, scientifically rigorous method that addresses concerns about traditional personality, cognitive, and intellectual assessments. Their experience exemplifies how integrating the Receptiviti API within talent assessment platforms and recruitment teams’ tech stacks strengthens decision-making in high-performance environments.
The Challenge: Pitfalls of Traditional Talent Assessment
In recent decades, the professional sports industry has increasingly incorporated data, statistics, and analytics into their talent selection and development strategies. While data related to athlete performance, athletic skills, and physicality is fundamental, professional leagues such as the NFL also rely on various tests to collect data about less visible aspects of players’ capabilities, including their IQ and cognitive abilities. However, as of 2025, several of these tests (such as the Wonderlic and S2 Cognition) have been removed from the draft process, either by the NFL or agencies representing players. Critics cite biased, unreliable results, cheating-prone tests, and lack of insights that are relevant to on-field performance as some of the many issues rendering previous approaches ineffective.
“...the agents at Athletes First have directed our draft prospects to respectfully pass on participating in any cognitive or psychological testing during the pre-draft process (e.g. AIQ, S2, etc.).”- The Athletic, Feb. 16, 2024
Concerns about the role of traditional assessment in candidate screening, predictive hiring, and other recruitment strategies also exist in industries beyond professional sports. Many in HR, people analytics, executive coaching, and talent acquisition recognize that there are factors that limit the ability for traditional assessments to provide an actionable lens into how someone is likely to behave in a professional setting. For example, social desirability, the tendency to answer questions in a manner that is socially acceptable or likely to result in a positive outcome, and other types of biases (reference group bias, self-other knowledge asymmetry, observer bias, etc.) are intrinsic to many types of traditional assessment.
Studies also show that self-awareness is uncommon, with few individuals demonstrating an accurate understanding of their own values, behaviors, and how their actions shape others’ perceptions of themselves. Such findings further undermine the reliability of self-report-based assessment methods in recruitment.
As the limitations of traditional cognitive testing, personality assessment, and psychological evaluation become more widely recognized, organizations that rely on psychological insights in recruitment, including the NFL, are becoming more open to embracing new technology-based approaches for assessment.
“...the league’s efforts to phase out the Wonderlic have not stopped NFL teams from trying to meaningfully assess what’s in a prospective player’s heart and head ahead of the draft." - The New York Times, March 2, 2022
Like many assessment-focused platforms and teams, the Tatnuck Group sought an innovative, reputable approach to evaluating performance-relevant psychological traits that is easily scalable and does not require self-assessment or psychological tests to produce valuable insights.
The Solution: The Receptiviti API
Receptiviti provides the only scientifically validated platform that transforms virtually any language data (e.g., transcribed speech, text, etc.) into actionable psychological insights. Unlike traditional assessments, Receptiviti’s psycholinguistics software derives insights from largely subconscious linguistic choices, making our insights less vulnerable to biases like social desirability or deliberate manipulation. Our technology focuses on measuring qualities that directly impact performance style, culture-fit, job-fit, and interpersonal dynamics, rather than abstract concepts like "intelligence." Moreover, Receptiviti’s psycholinguistic dimensions are accessible through our API, enabling real-time processing of large volumes of language data and easy integration into organizations' data pipelines and products.
Implementation: Data Collection and Integrating Receptiviti with Large Language Models (LLMs) for Report Generation
As the exclusive pre-draft interview and assessment provider of the 2025 Senior Bowl, the Tatnuck Group facilitated over 50 interviews of Senior Bowl players, asking questions related to the athletes’ football journeys and experiences. Interviews were recorded and transcribed with the players’ consent.
To efficiently generate reports that summarize actionable, validated psychological insights about each interviewed Senior Bowl player, the Receptiviti API was integrated into the Tatnuck Group’s workflow, alongside a large language model (LLM). Players’ transcripts were processed through the API, which analyzed each text sample across dimensions from Receptiviti’s Big 5 Personality, Drives, Thinking Fast and Slow, Interpersonal Circumplex, and Needs and Values Frameworks. The API produced quantitative insights (represented by rank-based scores) into players’ approaches to team dynamics, coaching relationships, motivations, and decision-making. These scores were used to create charts, visualizing how players ranked across the relevant dimensions.
Scores were also translated into categorical variables, such as "highest" or "lower." The categorical descriptions of players' ranks across Receptiviti’s psycholinguistic dimensions were fed into an LLM. Advanced prompts constrained the LLM to generate descriptive text summaries that were based solely on the psychological insights provided by the Receptiviti API. These prompts also incorporated psychological expertise, including definitions and interpretations of each Receptiviti dimension, to ensure the LLM’s interpretations were aligned with established research and relevant to NFL recruiters.
The Receptiviti API successfully provided data-driven, scientific insights into each player's psychology, while the LLM's role in generating descriptive summaries significantly reduced report creation time, eliminating the need for manual drafting of insight summaries. Together, the Receptiviti API and LLM provided a validated, scalable psychological analysis process that overcame the limitations of traditional assessment.
Results: Advancing NFL Recruitment and Talent Assessment with Player Psychology Reports
The Tatnuck Group presented two types of reports to NFL recruiters at the Senior Bowl:
Individual Reports (see sample report): Provide an in-depth analysis of each player’s personality, coachability, adaptability, self-awareness (inward focus), social awareness (outward focus), and work ethic.
Comparative Reports (see sample report): Provide an overview of players who are competing within the same position group (e.g., quarterbacks), highlighting similarities and differences between their personalities, interpersonal styles, motivations, and thinking styles.
Impact: A More Effective, Holistic, and Efficient Recruitment Process
The Receptivi API empowered the Tatnuck Group to automate the psychological evaluation of talent during a high-profile professional sports recruitment event. Using our dimensions, the Tatnuck Group generated psychological insights about players without extensive tests or self-reports, allowing recruiters to learn more about players in less time. Our language-based approach also produced psychological data that is not available through traditional assessment methods, offering new insights for NFL team managers, coaches, and scouts to consider during their due diligence processes.
“We’ve always looked for the most effective and reliable means to objectify what we do from an interview and assessment standpoint,” said AJ Scola, the former Assistant Director/Personnel at the Braves who founded Tatnuck Group in 2020 as a sports-focused talent assessment and development firm. “Receptiviti did a great job of delivering on that.” - Sports Business Journal, January 31, 2025
Why Does This Matter?
Companies like the Tatnuck Group are leveraging the Receptiviti API to transform talent evaluation in professional sports. However, the evolution of assessment in talent acquisition and development is relevant across a variety of industries.
Consider the utility of a language-based assessment approach:
Manage a high potential leadership pipeline by providing feedback and coaching on communication and leadership skills
Evaluate the job-fit of interview candidates based on interpersonal “soft” skills
Identify skill gaps in cognitive styles within an executive team prior to a major hire
Analyze employee engagement and motivation levels to tailor personalized development plans
Assess culture-fit during the interview process to improve long-term retention and team cohesion
Whether in professional sports, the corporate world of HR and people analytics, or sectors like government, the Receptiviti API can be integrated as an augment to human decision-making, offering insights that facilitate a more robust recruitment process. This goes beyond simply keeping up with AI-driven recruitment and HR technology trends; it is about strategically applying rigorous science and advanced technology to optimize hiring efficiency, minimize bias, and enable more data-driven, holistic talent evaluations.
Receptiviti offers the next generation of psychological assessment, combining scalable, repeatable analysis with scientifically rigorous insights that cannot be gamed. To learn more about how the Receptiviti API can support your talent strategies, contact us.
