Heritage

---

Dr. William E. Hall
The idea behind Talent Plus began in a one-room schoolhouse in Pleasant Valley, Ore., where Dr. William E. Hall taught eight different grade levels. While he was charged with helping students advance to the next grade, he was intrigued by the talent of his brightest students. He began to wonder what would happen if he could focus the majority of his time and energy on his best students.

Dr. Hall went on to earn a doctoral degree at Ohio State University, one of only two schools at the time where psychology departments studied talented people, studying under Dr. Carl Rogers. In addition to Rogers, two other significant psychologists of the day, Sidney L. Presser and Abraham Maslow, were keenly interested in the work that Dr. Hall was pursuing in the study of human potentiality and recruited him to teach at each of their universities.  Instead, he accepted a position at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, where he would eventually become the head of the Department of Educational Psychology.

While teaching at the university, he established the Nebraska Human Resources Research Foundation (NHRRF). Now known as the Nebraska Human Resources Institute (NHRI), the foundation paired talented grade-schoolers with equally talented college students who invested in the younger students and helped them develop their budding leadership potential. Dr. Hall quickly saw that talent flourish as a result of positive relationships and working on an individual's strengths.  It was while working with NHRRF that Dr. Hall first met Talent Plus co-founder and Chairman Doug Rath, then a college student counselor in the program.

In his continuing study of successful people, Dr. Hall ran various trials with college students to determine the best way to differentiate between highly talented and less talented student leaders. He first observed students in a variety of settings, then had them take written tests and eventually developed structured interviews to determine their talents.

The structured interview process allowed for the open expression of ideas, thoughts and feelings, which Dr. Hall grouped into "themes of personality" and found to be the most reliable and accurate in differentiating student leaders who excelled and those who did not.

Dr. Hall left academia in 1968 to use his structured interview process to identify top performers in the business world. In 1989, Dr. Hall formed Talent Plus with former student Doug Rath, along with Kimberly Rath and Sandy Maxwell. The creation of Talent Plus has allowed the study of talented people – and the relationships necessary to help that talent grow – to continue.