SIOP 2010: End of Day 1

SIOP 2010 Coverage
General: Schedule Planning | Lament Over Wireless Coverage
Live-Blogs: Day1 | Day 2 | Day 3
Daily Summaries: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

Despite being interested in a wide range of sessions today, I did end up in just one track.  Sorry – can’t be in more than one place at a time, no matter how hard I try.

The day started with the opening plenary around 8AM.  It started with short speeches given by three of the founding members of SIOP, which was extraordinarily interesting.  SIOP, as it turned out, was a gamble – the founders had no idea if the split from APA and establishment of the SIOP conference would work out.  Judging by the 3800 attendees this year, it was a good call.

We also got a fairly hilarious introduction to the presidential address from Ed Salas, and then the first ever SIOP music video for Kurt Kragier’s presidential address itself (to the tune of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, if you must know).  We also got to see quite a few new SIOP Fellow inductees, and various award recipients as well.

After that (and a lovely pecan roll at the coffee break), I sat in on Web 2.0 and Technology Innovation, a roundtable discussing the future of technology in I/O.  It was… not bad.  But I’m not sure how much we really accomplished.  Generally, someone would describe the use of a new technology in their company related to I/O, someone else would describe their own company’s effort, and everyone would nod their heads to the various strengths and weaknesses to each approach taken.  Interesting, certainly – and it was useful to see what practitioners are really using – but I don’t feel we made much headway toward any answers.  Of course, you might just blame that on the lack of research in this area (something I intend to help fix in the near future).

After this, I headed to an interactive poster session titled Cheating Improves My Test Performance.  It was a little disappointing – not because the posters weren’t interesting (they certainly were) but “cheating” was interpreted a bit liberally.  There were posters on differential prediction versus differential validity, measurement equivalence comparing proctored and unproctored testing, socially desirable responding, and retest effects on personality and cognitive online selection tests.  The retest piece (by Delgado et al.) was especially interesting to me personally since the effect they found may support the findings of another paper I wrote last year.

Next came Online Recruiting and Selection: New Challenges and Strategies, with basically the same outcome as the morning session on technology.

My poster was on display next, so the next session I got to was late afternoon: Assessment Center 2.0.  I approached this session with curiosity, because I wasn’t sure what its purpose was.  Would they be talking about a revolution in the way ACs are conducted (consistent with the 2.0 moniker), or would they be talking about conversion of ACs to online environments.  Turns out it was the latter.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing – just not what I was expecting.  Most of the recommendation they gave for how ACs were changing sounded to me simply like good AC exercise design: as jobs change, exercises should evolve to reflect those changes.  For example, one panelist said “gone are the days of a candidate sitting at a desk with a stack of papers [inbox].”  My response would be “of course,” because no one in a real functioning business needs to sort through memos anymore.  Of course we should change it to reflect what employees really do.

Afterward, we took a short cab ride to Woodfire Grill, which I highly recommend.  If you can eat at the restaurant of a Top Chef finalist, why wouldn’t you?

The evening was rounded out with parties from the University of Minnesota (my grad school alma mater) and Penn State, both of which were quite fun.  I hear, though, that Aon Consulting held theirs in the Georgia Aquarium.  How can you really compete with that?

As I mentioned before, there is no wifi in the conference hotel.  With only an iPhone (especially since Apple does not allow tethering), blog updates have been a little tricky.  I am attempting to rig up a new system that will enable me to live-blog tomorrow, but we’ll see if that works out!  In the meantime, follow me on twitter for real-time updates.