I have a long standing SIOP tradition: in the eleven conferences I’ve been to, I’ve never go to the presidential address that kicks things off on Friday morning. Not being ensconced in the organization’s inner echelon, it just never seemed like there was anything for me in it. This year, though, my boss was doing the slide show so he talked me into going. Here’s how it went:
8:30 – 9:15: Polite clapping for people I don’t know getting awards that I had no idea existed.
9:16 – 9:18: Someone on stage tells a funny story about SIOP and pornography (this is the highlight of the show so far).
9:19 – 9:30: A bunch of people show me some graphs.
9:30 – 9:32: Leatta Hough shows me old pictures of some German kid named “Fritz.”
9:33 – 10:00: Fritz Drasgow (possibly related to that German kid) refers to computerized testing as “a boondoggle.”
10:01: I make a note to myself to look up “boondoggle” in the dictionary.
So yeah. I won’t be going back next year. On to the sessions.
10:30 – 11:30 A.M. Panel Discussion – Personality Variables at Work
This was kind of supposed to be “Round 2” in a legendary panel discussion that started at last year’s conference. That discussion was supposed to be about faking in personality tests, but turned into a muck slinging contest over whether personality existed at all. Last year at one point someone in the audience got up and told several editors of top-tier scientific journals that they possessed a worse grasp of research methods than most of his undergraduate students. Hilarious! The only highlight this year, though, was that Barrick (of “Barrick and Mount” fame, you know you know them) actually used a slide with pictures of children and puppies. Point, set, and match to the pro-personality camp. But while this year’s board was better balanced in terms of pro- and anti-personality, it was nowhere near as cantankerous. Nobody got their nose smashed with a folding chair so I left early.
12:00 – 12:50 P.M. Practitioner Forum – Cutting Edge Tools for Traditional Job Analysis: How Technology Maximizes Efficiency
Not much to say here. It was basically a venue for a group of vendors to show off their products. Some neat stuff, but I’m kind of surprised how easy it is to get away with putting up a plain old online survey, giving it a few tweaks, and calling it a technology revolution. I do, however, really like the idea of putting job analysis tools online provided you do have experts involved at some point to give guidance.
1:00 – 2:50 P.M. Symposium – References and Recommendation Letters: Psychometric, Ethical, Legal, and Practical Issues
Shocker: Reference letters are uniformly glowing and don’t predict squat. I had hoped that this symposium would be more about references, but the bulk of it was on academic reference letters like you bug your professors to write when you apply to graduate school. One thing that I took away from this is that there’s more reliability between one letter writer’s letters across different students than there is between two letters by separate professors for one student. In other words, professors usually use form letters that, while they may be glowing, aren’t really all that specific to you. The other thing that struck me was the revelation that there are almost NO cases in which an employer has been sued for slander (or libel) after providing a negative reference check. In fact, there have been WAY more cases of employers being sued for negligent hiring because they failed to try and get a reference for someone who went on to do unspeakable things like molesting the snack machine.
3:30 – 4:50 P.M. Practitioner Forum – HR Technology Applications Now and Tomorrow
Hey, this was my presentation! I got to sit up in up in front behind the big table, overlooking the audience like a Lord and everything. Everything went fine and I was much less nervous than I expected to be. I honestly didn’t even listen to the other presentations, intent as I was on a last-minute review of my own. Only highlight was when my lapel mic fell off my jacket and I picked it up, saying “Uh oh, I’m having a wardrobe malfunction.” That got laughs, even if my assertion that good employment tests should not cause cancer did not.
That night I went to a little reception that the U. of Missouri – St. Louis alumni association put on. This was pretty cool, as there were a lot of people there that I hadn’t seen in a long time. Also, I got a free tee-shirt. After that I went reception hopping with a couple of the guys I used to work with at Anheuser-Busch. We didn’t necessarily have invitations to any of the receptions, but the only secret to getting in is to walk into the place like you belong there, grab a beer, and start talking loudly about that time that you did that thing with those people. At one point I went to the trouble of grabbing an invitee’s name tag out of the pile next to the door, choosing to impersonate my buddy David Morris, who had gotten an invitation. On my way out I ran in to David, who had been unable to find his purloined name tag and had chosen to go under the moniker “Ann-Marie Ryan.”
Wandered back to the hotel around 11:00 and was in bed by midnight. Pretty good for day 1.
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