Our History

Psychological Resources was incorporated in Georgia in 1970. Early on the focus was assessment for vocational rehabilitation, but by 1973-1974 Dr. Eber was developing applications for public safety and corrections use. The idea of psychological assessment for hiring in the public safety community was relatively new and just catching on.

By the late 70’s, the crisis over racial discrimination that was brewing in the Atlanta Police Department came to a head. When Judge Moya ordered that some method be found to correct this problem, Psychological Resources’ system was examined and judged to be the best resolution. With the least discriminatory impact of the options available, it also passed EEOC guidelines. The Atlanta Police Department began using the system, and in the months that followed, the Fire and Corrections departments came on board.

Still, the move to psychological assessment for hiring in the public safety sector was slow to catch on.

By the mid-80’s, the word was out! A good assessment system significantly helped in building better, more stable departments. By 1986, we could boast a customer list of over 200 departments, nationwide. Four years later that list would be twice as big! Today our customer base is more than 1,000 and growing strong.

In the late 70’s, just the ability to process and deliver a good report via computer-based scoring was incredible. We used answer “cards” that were fed through “readers” and it took a small mainframe to process the data. Constantly looking for ways to improve the system, we were watching PCs from the minute they hit the street. Early ones weren’t powerful enough, but that didn’t last long. By 1985 we were in full-blown migration mode and by 1986 had scrapped the mainframe and were running the system on PC. Lots of programming was done, but what our customers saw were better looking reports – printed by laser instead of daisy wheel or dot matrix. While this was occurring, the Windows revolution had begun. The office migrated from mainframe to Novell networked PCs, but it didn’t stop there. The migration flowed on to Windows and NT networking. Eventually the scoring/reporting system was migrated to Windows-based software. This was “behind the scenes,” but the result was the next big bonus to our customers – we moved from answer “cards” to answer “sheets”; plain paper sheets that could easily be faxed! We established a toll-free fax line in the early 90’s and began offering fax-in/fax-out capability on a regular basis. What had been at best a 3-day turnaround (overnight to us, score/report, overnight back) now could be done in the same day at a cheaper price (no overnight fees for either end). And reporting improved. We could now add longevity odds and present them in pie-chart format for easy viewing.

Through the years, along with processing the cases that come in, Psychological Resources is always doing research to improve the scoring and reporting. The more data we obtain, the better it gets! We always err on the side of security, but we have ideas for uses of the internet that should improve the “customer side” of our services yet again. Stay tuned for more…..