The Right Person in the Right Seat:
How the Predictive Index Can Transform Staffing in the Aquatics Industry
The aquatics industry has a people problem — and it's not the one most operators talk about.
Yes, the headline numbers are real. According to the 2025 Aquatic Trends Report, 41.8% of aquatic facility managers reported lifeguard staffing shortages in 2024. In pool service, annual technician turnover runs between 25% and 35%. Hiring plans are aggressive — 55% of pool service companies say they plan to add employees this year — but the labor market remains tight, and the cost of a bad hire has never been higher.
But here's what the data doesn't fully capture: the industry isn't just struggling to find people. It's struggling to put the right people in the right roles. It's promoting its best lifeguards into supervisory positions they weren't built for. It's hiring technicians based on availability rather than behavioral fit. It's losing good people not because of pay, but because of how they're being managed.
That's a different problem — and it has a different solution.
The Predictive Index (PI) is a science-backed behavioral assessment platform that has been used by more than 10,000 businesses for nearly 70 years to hire, develop, and retain talent. In the context of aquatics — whether you're running a municipal facility, a YMCA, a swim school, or a pool service company — PI addresses the structural people problems the industry has been trying to paper over with sign-on bonuses and recruiting campaigns.
What PI Actually Measures
PI measures four core behavioral drives:
Dominance — the need to control outcomes and drive results
Extraversion — the need for social interaction and collaboration
Patience — the need for consistency, routine, and stability
Formality — the need for structure, rules, and process
Every person has a unique combination of these drives. PI's 17 Reference Profiles describe common workplace personalities based on these combinations — and more importantly, PI allows organizations to build Job Targets that define what behavioral profile a specific role actually demands. When you match a person's behavioral drives to a role's requirements, you dramatically increase the likelihood of long-term success, engagement, and retention.
There is no bad profile. There is only fit — or misfit.
Pain Point 1: Staffing Shortages That Keep Coming Back
The staffing crisis in aquatics has improved since its peak in 2022, when 67.3% of facility managers reported lifeguard shortages. But improvement is not resolution. Nearly half of all facility managers are still affected, and in specific sectors — YMCAs at 68.3%, colleges at 56.8% — the problem is acute.
When you're perpetually understaffed, you can't afford a bad hire. Every wrong placement costs you training time, coverage gaps, customer relationships, and the energy required to start the search over. In pool service, when a technician departs mid-season, 40 to 80 weekly service stops need to be reassigned without interruption. That's not just a staffing inconvenience — it's a customer retention crisis.
PI addresses this by shifting hiring from gut feel to behavioral data. Before you post a job or schedule a single interview, you build a Job Target — a benchmark that defines the behavioral and cognitive drives most likely to succeed in that specific role, in your specific environment. Every candidate is then evaluated against that benchmark, giving you a match score and a structured interview guide tailored to the areas of potential misalignment.
You stop hiring the person who interviews well. You start hiring the person who will actually thrive.
Pain Point 2: The Wrong People Get Promoted
This is the most expensive and least discussed problem in aquatics — and the data backs it up.
The National Aquatic Industry Workforce Report 2025 found that while 57% of aquatics workers rate leadership quality as high, 15% rate it as low. Research on swim instructor and lifeguard turnover consistently identifies management and leadership style as a primary driver of people leaving the industry. The problem isn't that aquatics organizations lack talented people. The problem is that the industry defaults to promoting its best technical performers into leadership roles — without ever asking whether those people are behaviorally suited to lead.
The best lifeguard on your deck and the best supervisor of lifeguards are not the same person. The best pool technician on your routes and the best route manager are not the same person. Technical excellence is about skill. Leadership fit is about behavioral drives — the need to influence others, the comfort with conflict, the capacity to hold people accountable, the patience to develop rather than just perform.
PI's Behavioral Assessment surfaces this distinction before the promotion happens. A high-Patience, low-Dominance technician who runs flawless routes and never misses a chemical test may be extraordinarily uncomfortable managing five other technicians, resolving customer complaints, and making fast decisions under pressure. That's not a character flaw — it's a behavioral reality. And if you promote that person without understanding it, you lose a great technician and gain a struggling manager, while morale on the team declines and turnover follows.
PI gives you a map before you make that call. And when you do promote someone, it tells you exactly how to develop them — what their natural gaps are, how they process feedback, and how they need to be supported as they grow into the role.
Pain Point 3: Retention Is a Management Problem, Not Just a Compensation Problem
Industry research consistently shows that pay is rarely the primary reason people leave. The 2025 Aquatic Workforce Report found that workers across aquatics roles most frequently cite purpose and community impact as the most rewarding parts of their jobs. These are people who are mission-aligned — they want to be there. And yet they still leave.
Why? Because purpose-driven people still burn out when they're managed in ways that conflict with their behavioral needs.
A Guardian profile — methodical, process-oriented, stability-seeking — needs clear expectations, consistent feedback, and a predictable structure. Throw them into a chaotic seasonal environment with shifting priorities and a manager who improvises constantly, and they disengage quickly, even if they love the mission.
An Operator profile — patient, cooperative, reliable — thrives with stable relationships, routine responsibilities, and space to develop expertise over time. Micromanage them or move them around too frequently, and you've removed everything that motivates them.
A Promoter profile — social, enthusiastic, people-oriented — needs interaction, recognition, and variety. Isolate them on a solo route or bury them in data entry, and they'll be gone by mid-season.
PI gives every manager a practical guide to every person on their team — not a personality label, but an actionable framework for how to communicate, how to assign work, how to recognize contributions, and how to have difficult conversations in a way that lands rather than backfires.
When you manage people in alignment with how they're actually wired, engagement rises. And when engagement rises, retention follows. Research consistently shows that high-engagement workplaces experience 24% less turnover — a number that means something very specific in an industry where turnover runs at 25–35% annually.
Pain Point 4: The Industry Has No Behavioral Pipeline for Leadership Development
The aquatics industry has done serious work on technical certification pathways. CPO, AFO, Aquatic Supervisor, Aquatic Manager — these credentials validate that a person knows the chemistry, the regulations, the safety protocols. That work matters.
What the industry has not built is a behavioral framework for identifying who should be developed toward leadership, when they're ready, and how they need to be supported along the way. Promotion decisions in aquatics are overwhelmingly based on tenure, technical competence, and availability. Behavioral fit is an afterthought — if it's considered at all.
PI closes that gap. Using the Team Discovery tool, you can map the behavioral landscape of your entire leadership group and identify what's missing. If every supervisor on your team has high Patience and low Dominance, you have a group that executes well and avoids conflict — but won't push back on unsafe practices, won't hold difficult performers accountable, and won't drive change. That's a safety and organizational performance risk.
PI helps you see your team's behavioral gaps before they become operational failures — and build your development pipeline with intention rather than default.
Pain Point 5: Seasonal and Part-Time Workforce Is Managed as a Commodity
Seasonal staffing in aquatics is treated as a necessary churn. People come, people go, and the assumption is that this is simply the nature of the business. But within every seasonal workforce are people who could become long-term contributors, crew leads, or future facility managers — if anyone took the time to identify them.
PI makes that identification fast. A short behavioral assessment takes less than ten minutes to complete. The data it returns tells you which returning seasonal employees have the behavioral profile for advancement, which new hires should be fast-tracked into crew lead responsibilities, and which candidates — however enthusiastic they seem in an interview — are likely to struggle with the specific demands of the role.
You stop treating your seasonal workforce as interchangeable. You start building a pipeline within it.
The Connection to How Great Organizations Are Actually Built
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, identified the single most important factor in a company's leap from average performance to sustained excellence: getting the right people on the bus — and in the right seats — before you decide where the bus is going.
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, in Extreme Ownership, make a related argument from a different angle: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. But a leader who is behaviorally misaligned with what their role demands isn't a bad person — they're a person in the wrong seat.
PI operationalizes both of these principles with behavioral science rather than aspiration. It doesn't tell you who is a good or bad person. It tells you who is a good or bad fit — for this role, in this organization, at this stage of its growth.
For aquatics professionals committed to building something excellent — not just functional, not just compliant, but genuinely excellent — PI is one of the most direct investments you can make. The industry's people problems are real. But they are not primarily a supply problem. They are a fit problem, a development problem, and a management problem.
And all three of those are solvable.
Where to Start
You don't need to roll out PI across your entire organization on day one. The most common entry points are:
Build a Job Target for your highest-turnover role. Define what behavioral profile actually succeeds there. Hire against it for one season and measure the difference.
Run Behavioral Assessments for your current leadership team. Use the Team Discovery to see your group's behavioral composition — where you have coverage and where you have gaps.
Assess before your next promotion. Before you move your best technician or lifeguard into a supervisory role, understand their behavioral profile and what development support they'll need to succeed.
The aquatics industry attracts people who care deeply about safety, community, and the work. The people are there. PI helps you find the right ones for the right roles, develop them intentionally, and keep them longer.
That's not just good people management. In an industry where the person on deck makes life-or-death decisions, it's a professional responsibility.
Interested in learning more about how PI can support your aquatics operation? Reach out to discuss what a behavioral hiring and development strategy could look like for your team.
