Angelo Valenti

For more than four decades, business leaders have called Dr. Angelo Valenti when a hiring decision is too important to get wrong.

Known as The Company Psychologist, Angelo has assessed thousands of candidates for organizations ranging from founder-led startups to multi-billion-dollar companies. His clients span healthcare, insurance, financial services, retail, distribution, telecommunications, transportation, and more. His core belief, learned the hard way, is this: "Companies hire for skills but fire for attitude."

His path to psychology started on a baseball diamond. As a teenager in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Major League teams scouted him, but he realized his ceiling was higher in the classroom than on the field. He went on to play college football and baseball at Case Western Reserve University while earning his psychology degree. He then earned an MS and a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Georgia. He chaired the psychology department at Oklahoma City University, and then joined the global consulting firm RHR International, where he found his calling. In 1982, he opened his own practice in Nashville. He still runs it today, designing hiring systems that predict performance and coaching executives and rising leaders.

Angelo's books start from the same idea: most of us make things much harder than they need to be.

Hire Right or Pay Twice: How to Predict Performance, Avoid Bad Hires, and Build Teams That Win distills 40+ years of assessment experience into the STPV Framework (Skills, Talents, Personality, and Values). It's a practical system for seeing past the résumé to what truly drives success.

You're Making This Way Too Hard: Find YOUR Easy Way to NJOYLFE turns a psychologist's eye on everyday life. It's a candid, funny, refreshingly un-preachy guide to finding contentment. The book is named after the license plate on every car he's owned since 1991.

He is also co-author of Unleashing Leadership: Aligning What Your People Do Best With What Your Organization Needs Most, and a member of the American Psychological Association and its Division of Consulting Psychology.

When he's not helping companies build teams that win, you'll find him on the golf course or with his wife, Rachel, their three sons, and six grandchildren. People sometimes ask whether he's still working. His answer: "My retirement party and my funeral are going to be on the same day."