SIOP 2025 Conference

As has been my routine for the last several years, I attended the annual Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology conference in Denver. The purpose is two-fold: networking and learning. On the points regarding learning, I can say that I've learned a few new techniques that could prove valuable:

Learnings:

• Social Network Analyses, or SNA for short, have to do with the graph capability of networking to provide useful information concerning some business-related phenomena. This could be anything ranging from job movement, to visualizing an organizational hierarchy, to mapping the e-mail patterns of the corporate executive team. It's surprising to me that SNA is not being leaned into more at SIOP, especially concerning that SNA can effectively model communication patterns and solve for rather complex issues such as succession planning.
• Metrics. You thought us I/O Psychologists have figured it all out with regards to custom metrics, but we are far from that truth. There was a couple presentations on new metrics being constructed at ZScaler concerning time-to-fill for volume hiring, and at Dropbox for answering the business question, "is SWE talent only available for hire in the Bay area?". Therefore, the metrics here deal with job performance and hiring times.
• Another session proposed the idea of letting an LLM serve as a proxy for item-related performance and statistics. There was promising performance utilizing a BERT model for item generation. Everything doesn't always have to require the state of the art performance from the latest and greatest LLM. Let's not forget the tools from the (not so) distant past.
• Finally, one session was a very hands-on application of building an R shiny app and deploying it to AWS. I've saved the instructions step-by-step, because I have a few currently offline shiny apps that I'd like to upload to my website in order to showcase some previous work. As I work through these pieces, it is becoming more and more necessary for me to learn the basics concerning AWS, as this will serve as my general hosting area for these (and future) projects.

The networking at SIOP simply cannot not be found anywhere else. The energy, enthusiasm and willingness of people to chat makes the event a truly melting pot for ideas across industries, while also bolstering your contact list in general.

In the past, I did a bit of volunteering for SIOP and stood up an R Shiny Dashboard for Membership Analytics, however, when mandatory retirement (after 3 years) came around, I hardly had anybody to pass the project (and the enthusiasm) too. Perhaps it's time to revisit the volunteering opportunities at SIOP.