Software upgrade support guide
Our stated mission at The Predictive Index is Better Work, Better World, and that mission transcends our software and product offerings, extending throughout the user experience. It’s with this lofty ideal in mind that we’re unveiling significant enhancements to our Talent Optimization platform.
As PI matures, we’re evolving the user experience to reflect the fact that we’re no longer just an assessment company, but an end-to-end resource for enhancing the candidate and post-hire experiences. Practically speaking, that means where users may have once pulled behavioral insights out of a drawer for individual reference, they’re now equipped with clear talent recommendations they can apply across the employee lifecycle—from hiring and onboarding to team dynamics, management, and engagement.
We realize this transition will require adjustments, but feel confident in the long-term benefits users will experience through:
- Streamlined functionality
- Improved sharing and collaboration
- Reduced administrative burden
- Guided learning experiences to optimize performance and results
We also expect you’ll find serious value in the sheer amount of time you get back. We’ve reduced the learning curve related to onboarding—and by making it easier to roll out to other members of your organization, we hope you’re freed up to maximize some of the software’s more dynamic offerings.
We take pride in offering software that helps you—and 10,000+ other clients—make smarter, data-driven talent decisions across the employee lifecycle. We’ve spent years observing how the PI software is used, and we’ve listened to feedback from you, the user. To that end, we’ve focused on enhancements that make our tools easier to understand, easier to apply day-to-day, and respected—even championed—by people throughout the organization (not just HR).
Prepare for upgrade
This guide is divided into several sections:
- Navigating the changes: See a glossary of new terms, and watch a walkthrough video of the biggest changes.
- Platform and Admin features: See what’s new for Account Owners, so you can use PI2 with confidence.
- Upgrade support by product: Explore what’s new for each of the PI products, as well as what’s coming soon.
If you don’t have time to review this guide, no worries. We’ve prepared a helpful one-pager designed to give you a high-level recap.
Get helpful information you need to be successful, when and where you need it.
In our legacy software, you had to leave the software to get the information you needed to be successful, whether that was a quick technical “how to” or a deeper dive into the best-in-class use cases for our products. You also had to know exactly what you were looking for and, in many cases, that required you to create an account or log in.
Those days are over.
In PI2, we’re integrating education directly into our software. The information you need to be successful is right at your fingertips, on the page where you’re performing an action or using a feature.
The Welcome Guide
For help getting up and running quickly with PI2, visit the Welcome Guide. Click the book icon in the top-right of your screen, and a panel with open sharing key details about your new PI experience.
Your Welcome Guide includes:
- The names of your company’s PI admins
- A summary of new products and features
- Information on updated user permissions
- Guidance around data and folder management
- And much more
The Welcome Guide has expandable info boxes, plus additional resources to help you dig deeper into the changes. If you’re an account admin, any items you check off will be shared with fellow admins, ensuring you don’t duplicate efforts!
The Resource Center
In instances where you’d like additional learning or support, click the Resource Center button, denoted by the question mark in the top-right corner of your software.
We’ve introduced several new bells and whistles to your Resource Center for PI2, including:
- A documentation site, where you’ll find product FAQs and how-to help
- A PI Basics course, designed to refresh you on our science and help you roll out PI in your organization
- A revamped education page, where you’ll find courses, e-books, certifications, reports, and more
Almost all of the content you will find is free to access and share. The only time we “gate” content and ask you to create an account or sign in to your existing account is when you choose to take one of our certifications. Regardless, finding what you’re looking for has never been easier.
We’re always updating these resources, so be sure to bookmark them and check back regularly!
Navigating the changes: Legacy to PI2 user experience differences
Looking for a specific PI feature? Here are some notable name changes between the legacy and PI2 experiences.
You can find Group Analytics by clicking the graph icon in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
We’ve embedded assessment sending right within each PI product. You can also send assessments from the Administration page.
Your employee and assessment data are now all in one place. Find them by clicking the gear icon 
in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
We rebranded Company Settings as Organization Settings to better reflect the diversity of our clients.
You can find the Employee Directory by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
To improve the usability of invitation links in PI2, we’ve updated the feature name ever so slightly. Moving forward, these links will be referred to as open invitation links, or OI links for short. Learn more about OI links in PI2.
The Job Assessment from the legacy experience has been streamlined significantly. Many Hire clients reported the old process felt cumbersome and repetitive. This new, shorter-form assessment consists of just 20 items, compared to the legacy experience’s 90 items. Learn how it works.
You can download any employee’s Management Strategy Guide from their “person” page in Inspire. (Note: The Management Strategy Guide is only available as a downloadable asset.)
You can view or download any employee’s Management Skills Guide from their “person” page in Inspire.
We’ve rebranded Match Score and given it a visual refresh. Whereas Match Score illustrated job fit with a number ranging from 1 to 10, Fit Rating uses a five-star scale. This new scale includes half-stars, so the functionality itself hasn’t changed at all.
You can view or download any employee’s Personal Development Guide from their “person” page in Inspire.
Whereas User Roles in the legacy experience applied to the entire platform, employee access levels in PI2 apply by product. You can manage access levels from the Employee Access Settings page; find it by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
We’ve sunsetted the Synthesis in PI2. Why? Compared to the Self and Self-Concept, it offered little additional interpretive value for hiring managers.
Retiring the Synthesis will allow us to reinforce the scientific measures that do offer unique value, so you can hire faster and smarter.
Platform and Admin features
This section walks through the updated admin experience, including platform navigation, assessment sending, user permissions, and organization settings.
The first thing you will notice when logging into PI2 is your new dashboard. Use this dashboard to view recent activity (e.g., new assessment results, new jobs), send out Behavioral Assessment invites to employees, and quickly hop to various PI features.
We’ve also simplified the top menu bar to reduce clutter and help you access different PI products, faster. To return to the dashboard, simply click the PI button in the top-left corner.
All of your legacy features are here—just with a fresh look and feel.
Looking for your Employee Directory? We’ve added it to your Administration page, so you can manage employee data and company settings all in one place.
View the Administration page by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner. There, you can:
- In the People tab:
- Upload an organization file to make bulk changes to your directory or send bulk software/BA invites.
- Add new employees and manage their details (either individually or in bulk).
- Send the PI Behavioral Assessment to employees who haven’t taken it.
- Manage access for employees and third-party users.
- Archive employees to revoke software access or retire data you no longer need.
- In the Folders tab:
- Create folders to organize employees and jobs.
- View uncategorized jobs and place them into folders.
- View uncategorized employees and place them into folders.
- In the Organization Settings tab:
- Access organization settings such as multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Anonymize records for employees and candidates.
- In the Billing tab:
- Review billing information as well as your PI consultant’s contact information.
- In the Integrations tab:
- Manage integration configurations and modify open API settings.
We’ve updated assessment sending to make the Behavioral Assessment process simpler.
The Assessment Center in the legacy experience has been integrated with your Employee Directory. Now, you can invite employees into the software and send them BAs with a single organization file upload. (You can also send assessments individually if you prefer.)
We’ve also embedded assessment sending into each of the PI products:
- Hire: Send Behavioral and Cognitive Assessments to candidates right from an open job.
- Inspire: Invite a co-worker to Inspire, and they’ll automatically receive a BA invite.
- Design: Add a team member to Design, and they’ll automatically receive a BA invite.
If you’ve already assessed your employees, you can view their Reference Profiles from the employee directory. For detailed behavioral insights, access a person’s Snapshot in Inspire, view a shared Team in Design, or view a shared Job in Hire.
Please note: Due to these changes, the ability to send assessments via custom invitation links will only be available in Hire. Any existing candidate links you have active from the legacy experience will be imported into PI2; however, these links will no longer be able to be modified. All other links will be sunsetted. Learn more about invitation links in PI2.
We’ve redesigned how user roles work. Not only are we making these roles more intuitive, but we’re giving you greater control over how you use them.
In the legacy experience, user roles gave blanket permissions across PI’s products. This meant that someone with admin access could see and do anything, with little flexibility to fine-tune their access.
In PI2, we’re allowing you to select user roles—now known as access levels—on a per-product basis. We’ve also simplified the naming of these roles to make the permission process easier to understand.
To ensure a smooth upgrade process, we’ve given your PI2 users permission defaults that correspond with their existing legacy user roles. Here’s the full breakdown:
| Legacy User Role | PI2 Hire Access Level | PI2 Inspire Access Level | PI2 Design Access Level | PI2 Diagnose Access Level |
| Account Owner | Organization Admin* | |||
| Account Admin | Hire admin | Inspire admin | Design admin | Diagnose admin |
| Power User | Limited | Limited, can invite co-workers | Limited | No access |
| User | Limited | Limited, can invite co-workers | Limited | No access |
| Read Only | No access | Limited, cannot invite co-workers | No access** | No access |
| Third Party User | See note*** | |||
* Organization Admin includes Cognitive Admin permission, where applicable.
** If an employee had read-only access to teams in legacy Design, they will no longer have access to the software in PI2. You can restore their access by modifying their access level to Limited. (The employee will receive an invitation to log in to PI Design.)
***Third party users have the same privileges as an organization admin, with some exceptions. Learn more about the differences.
Not sure what permission level to give for each product? Here are some recommendations based on role and responsibilities.
In the legacy experience, folders allowed you to organize jobs, candidates, and employees. They also functioned as a way to control who could see what within the PI platform. While companies with impeccable organization skills were able to take full advantage of folders, many other clients felt the old system was cumbersome and confusing.
In PI2, we have simplified the way folders work. Just like in the legacy software, you can organize employees into folders, as well as jobs (and, by extension, the candidates for those jobs). You can then extend folder access permissions to users, allowing you to fine-tune job access to your liking.
Group Analytics (previously, just “Analytics”) lets you overlay two or more people’s behavioral data, so you can visualize trends. Use the results to analyze a group of top performers to find shared strengths or compare employees to their current job to identify development opportunities.
We’ve moved Group Analytics from its old dropdown menu in the legacy experience. Access it by clicking the graph icon (
) in the right-hand corner of your top navigation bar.
All the features you’ve come to expect are here—just with a new look and feel. Learn more.
One of our biggest goals with PI2 is to make it easier and simpler for you to embed PI into your daily workflow.
We know integrations play an important role here. To better support your needs outside of PI, we’re taking time to rebuild our portfolio of supported plugins and extensions. Greenhouse is a much-requested ATS integration that is now available to configure with PI as a paid add-on. Additional integrations are also in the works.
We’ll have more to share about our integrations roadmap in the future. In the meantime, if you have specific requests please add them to our Product Feedback tracker. If someone has already requested it, please upvote it!
Many of our clients use multiple domain names across their organization. Support for multiple domains was a key component of the legacy experience, and we’re making it easier to manage and modify on your end.
Account admins can manually set organization domains right within the software. Later this year, you’ll also be able to remove domains you no longer need.
If you’d like to remove domains in the meantime, we ask that you reach out to our support team. Submit a request here.
Note: Allowable email domains are restricted to business domains associated with your organization. However, we have added the ability for account admins to override this restriction and add non-allowed emails.
If you’ve read our Behavioral Reports in the legacy experience, you’re likely familiar with the concept of the Self, Self-Concept, and Synthesis. You’re probably also familiar with Factor E, which previously showed up solely on the Synthesis.
In PI2, we’ve sunsetted the Synthesis. Why? For many clients, it was confusing. For us, it was also holding our science for Factor E back.
“In the legacy experience, Factor E reflects an average Self and Self-Concept score, which wasn’t particularly informative,” said Dana Pollet, PhD, Manager of Product Science at PI. “In PI2, you can now interpret your E Factor for both the Self and Self-Concept, the same way you would with any other factor. This means a lot of people will be seeing a difference in their E scores, but we very much view this as a positive! The new E is the proper and accurate measure of one’s actual drive for objectivity in decision making.”
Want an even deeper look into the science? Here’s the high-D explanation:
“Factor E will appear differently in PI2’s Self and Self-Concept than it did in the the legacy experience Synthesis. In the legacy experience, E was omitted from the Self and Self-Concept because, historically, it was not measured independently. It was derived by ‘double-loading’ some items on the PI Behavioral Assessment, meaning some adjectives contributed to, say, both Factors D and E, Factors C and E, etc. Under that model, Factor E was only a stable measure when aggregated in the synthesis graph. E is no longer double-loaded onto factors. It is measured independently with 19 new adjectives and is scored identically to the ABCD factors. So, we can now present it in both the Self and Self-Concept in PI2.”
Subscribed to certain PI products, but not all? We’ve launched free, no-commitment trials for each of our products in PI2, so you can try them for yourself before you buy.
| Product | Hire | Inspire | Design | Diagnose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type of trial | Sample of features | All features | Sample of features | All features |
| Trial length | 7 days | 7 days | Untimed | 7 days |
As you navigate PI2 for the first time, you may have additional software questions. We’ve updated your resource center with how-to articles and other support education to help you get unstuck and find value, faster.
Click the question mark icon in the top-right corner, and you’ll see the new Resource Center. There, you’ll find two new resources:
- Documentation: Search our knowledge base of product how-tos and other support articles.
- PI Basics: Read up on our science and get tips for implementing PI at your organization.
Not sure where to start? No worries. We’ve embedded much of this education right within the software itself, so guidance is always just a few clicks away.
Notable changes
In the legacy experience, people could be classified as one of various “person types” (e.g., employee, candidate, other, unknown). Over time, the amount of “other” or “unknown” types in the system created heavy administration upkeep for many of our clients.
In PI2, we’ve streamlined these person types significantly. Now, there are just two types: employee and candidate.
To ensure your employee directory and Candidates tab are accurate, we’ve updated the criteria for classifying employees and candidates. If you do not see a particular employee or candidate, you can find them within your Transferred People page.
To reduce admin upkeep and help you find the data you need quicker, we’ve streamlined how we categorize employee and candidate information within the software.
All of your people records will be transferred as part of the upgrade process. However, any records that don’t match the new criteria for being classified as an “employee” or “candidate” will be moved to a dedicated Transferred People page.
Use this page to search for and quickly add people to your employee directory or Candidates tab.
Platform/Admin FAQs
Check your Transferred People page, located just under the employee directory on the left-hand sidebar in Administration.
There, you will see a list of any people who are not currently classified as an “employee” or “candidate.” If you see someone who belongs in your employee directory, you can move them there in just a few clicks. The same goes if you see a candidate who belongs in Hire.
At PI, we believe strongly that your initial BA self-results are the most accurate. Studies show that behavior doesn’t tend to change dramatically over time—except following major life events.
In the legacy experience, it was possible to flip between multiple Behavioral Assessment results per user. Here’s our own perspective on when to retake the BA:
“People’s personalities sometimes change very slowly as they grow older, which makes sense—who we are when we are 18 is not exactly who we are when we are 40. This is a general trend that would affect any personality assessment. In general, results from the PI Behavioral Assessment are expected to be stable enough to support decisions that span multiple years. Specifically, our test-retest analyses show that the results remain reasonably stable for up to 6-8 years. (For reference, the median job tenure in the U.S. is about 4 years.)
Generally, we advise clients to stick with the ‘Self’ results of their first assessment unless there are extenuating circumstances that affected the result (e.g., the participant did not take the assessment in their preferred language). The Self-Concept can be administered more frequently. Further, we recommend re-administering the BA after 6-8 years if a high-stakes decision needs to be made about an individual.”
Currently, PI2 only allows users to have one set of BA results. That said, we recognize that clients do enjoy the opportunity to retake the BA, and are pleased to confirm that support for multiple BAs is on the way!
In the future, you’ll be able to retake both the Self and the Self-Concept—an addition we hope will facilitate healthy professional development conversations. Expect more details later this year.
Need to retake the BA in the meantime? Reach out to our support team, and we’ll be happy to help.
You can export a CSV containing key employee information—including Reference Profile—from the employee directory. Learn how here.
In the legacy experience, custom invitation links were located in the Assessment Center. For PI2, we’re embedding that functionality right into the Hire experience.
Any legacy candidate links will be transferred to PI2 and accessible via a link titled “Imported invitation links” within the Candidates tab. Candidates will be able to use a transferred link to take the BA; however, the link itself will no longer be modifiable.
You can create net-new invitation links in PI2 at any time. These new links are modifiable.
Please note: Any invitation links not attached to a job (including employee and “other” links) will no longer be accessible in PI2.
As part of the transition to your upgraded software experience, we recommended our weekly Upgrade Support Webinars to get you started in your updated software experience.
We’re finalizing all of our other workshops for PI2, but they’re not available just yet. We’ll have more to share about workshops in late spring.
English is the only language currently supported within the PI software. That said, Hire and Inspire users can download Behavioral Reports in the following 13 languages:
- Chinese (simplified)
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Italian
- Korean
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish (Spain)
- Swedish
In the future, we plan to localize the PI2 software to support the above languages. We’ll have more to share about our localization plans the coming months.
Although the PI software only supports English, the PI Behavioral Assessment can be taken in 68 different languages:
- English (US)
- Afrikaans
- Albanian (Albania)
- Arabic (International)
- Armenian (Armenia)
- Basque
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese (People’s Republic of China)
- Chinese (Taiwan)
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch (Netherlands)
- Estonian (Estonia)
- Farsi
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French (France)
- FYRO Macedonian
- Georgian
- German (Germany)
- Greek
- Greenlandic
- Gujarati
- Haitian Creole
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Ilocano
- Indonesian
- Italian (Italy)
- Japanese
- Kazakh
- Khmer
- Korean
- Lao
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay (Malaysia)
- Malayalam
- Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Papiamentu
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Romanian (Romania)
- Punjabi
- Russian
- Serbian (Cyrillic, Serbia)
- Croatian (Croatia)
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish (Spain, Modern Sort)
- Spanish (Latin America)
- Swedish
- Tamil
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
- Samoan
- Sesotho
- Sinhalese (Sri Lanka)
- Swahili
- Tongan
- Xhosa
- Zulu
Upgrade support by product
Learn and understand the new features, improved functionality, notable changes, what’s ahead, and FAQs for each product.
Hire
Inspire
Design
Diagnose
What’s next?
We hope this resource provides all the information you need to smoothly transition and continue enjoying a fruitful PI software experience. We’ll be updating it regularly as we gather feedback from you, the user. If we missed anything, please use this form to let us know.
If you encounter any bugs or technical issues with the software, please reach out to our User Operations team for assistance via this form.
Lastly, we’re working to reduce the number of emails you receive from PI, but keep an eye out for our monthly feature release emails. We’ll be compiling all the most pertinent updates for you in one place, every month, and you can stay up-to-date by checking out our release notes page at any time.
Helpful links
Feedback on this resource
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To inform us of a typo or other error, click here. To request a new feature, click here.