IQ Hurts Sales? The Data Scientist Who Burned Down Old Hiring | Regina Chou

Mar 18, 2026

Regina Chou, an organizational psychologist and data scientist who built the REGI Blueprint to predict human potential, challenges traditional hiring. She shares surprising findings like IQ hurting sales at dealerships. Short experiments without resumes, traits like hope, resilience and even material aspiration shift who succeeds. She urges using data plus heart to hire for potential, not pedigree.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

IQ Can Hurt Sales Performance

IQ isn't a universal predictor of job performance and can even correlate negatively in some roles.
Regina Chou discovered IQ had a negative correlation with cars sold at a Mercedes-Benz dealership because higher IQ beyond a point reduced sales effectiveness.

INSIGHT

Hope And Resilience Predict Performance

Hope, optimism, and emotional resilience repeatedly predict strong job performance across industries.
Regina measures these traits as drivers of persistence and recovery, making them more predictive than traditional metrics like IQ.

ANECDOTE

Blind Hiring Produced Durable Hedge Fund Hires

Diamond Asia Capital ran a blind hiring experiment with 3,000 applicants and no resumes to test psychographic hiring.
They hired eight apprentices and most were still successful five years later, proving resume-blind selection worked.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Most founders use data for every part of their business - except hiring. They run numbers on their product, their marketing, their cash flow. But when it comes to the most expensive decision in the company, they trust a gut feeling and a resume.

Regina Chou is changing that. She grew up in a rice paddy in Taiwan, became the first in her family to attend college, and built a predictive hiring engine that analyzes 450 psychographic traits to determine - before the offer letter goes out - whether someone will perform and whether they will stay. Her REGI Blueprint powers the Performance Machine and has helped scale companies from Mercedes-Benz dealerships to CrowdStrike's $2 billion IPO.

In this conversation, Regina shares the data point that upended decades of hiring science (IQ hurting sales), the blind experiment that proved resumes are irrelevant, and why the most surprising traits - hope, greed, emotional resilience - are the ones that actually predict your next great hire.

In this episode, we talk about:

IQ has a negative correlation to car sales at Mercedes-Benz dealerships - the traits you assume matter most might be working against you
Hope, optimism, and emotional resilience are the consistent predictors of performance across industries and job roles
A blind hiring experiment with 3,000 applicants and zero resumes produced hires still succeeding five years later
"Greed" - aspiration for material goods - turned out to be a top performance driver for garage door technicians
Same company, same product, different countries - top performer profiles were vastly different across cultures
Gen Z wants the same thing every generation wants - meaningful work and an environment where they can thrive
Regina's formula for founders: combine data and technology with heart to build a winning hiring system

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Why traditional hiring science is broken

1:16 Regina's origin story - Taiwan, poverty, and a grandfather's dream

5:55 The Mercedes-Benz IQ discovery

8:35 Building a model that predicts actual performance

14:32 Blind hiring at Diamond Asia Capital

19:55 Tommy Mello and the greed factor

23:22 Gen Z - same challenges, louder voice

27:02 Data + heart: advice for struggling founders

31:54 The vision - when resumes become irrelevant

PS – When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

Join me for the Ai Accelerator Workshop this March 25th - LIVE from Genius Network Headquarters - register here: www.AiAccelerator.com/Live
Want to discover your next big opportunity? Meet me for a Cup of Coffee at my Digital Cafe (this is where we can meet): www.MikeKoenigs.com/1kCoffee
Ready to reinvent yourself, your business, and your brand, and create “Your Next Act”? Watch this.