Well, the 2012 Society for Industrial/Organization Psychology (SIOP) annual conference has come and gone.  We are proud of our team for exceeding the number of presentations given last year and, although our schedule was full, we were able to attend many sessions.  As usual, there were many interesting topics presented and discussed by I/O psychologists.  However two themes seemed to really stand out and both of them have received a lot of attention the past several SIOP conferences.

An article was recently published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology.  The article, Social
Networking Websites, Personality Ratings, and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye? (Kluemper, Rosen, & Mossholder; 2012), is gaining some interest in the popular press and in other blogs.  The researchers took an interesting look at whether or not raters could accurately assess personality based on social media (e.g. facebook pages).  The authors reported relationships between these personality attributions from social media sources, self-report personality measures, cognitive ability measures, and supervisor ratings of performance.  It is a well done piece with strong methods – all the things I look for in an academic paper. 

As a selection researcher and practitioner, I spend my energy on a daily basis working towards primarily one goal . . . predicting job performance.  Consequently, when a new method to do so is suggested, I am open and listening to see what I can learn.  Based on my reading of this article I’m not sure I am going to start recommending this practice to my clients just yet.  In particular, there are three considerations that would make me recommend a Select International Assessment over the social networking website personality rating approach:

If you’re an organization that utilizes an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and on-line assessment for assisting your hiring process, there’s a good chance you’ve thought about Assessment Integration (AI). Especially if you’re utilizing two platforms to manage your recruiting process and another to provide your candidate assessments, it’s smart to think that combining those two systems could be beneficial to your recruiters, candidates and hiring managers. Knowing that there’s benefit in integrating is normally where the process starts. Where it goes from there is sometimes a very thought provoking path and each organization will have its own reasons for deciding to integrate assessments or not. If you’re just starting the process of finding an ATS this information will be beneficial to your discovery. If you’ve already picked an ATS you may find that this information hits close to home. Here are a few things you need to know about Applicant Tracking Systems and Assessment Integration.

On Monday, February 28^th I will be presenting at the ATP Innovations in Testing Conference in Palm Springs, CA.  I will be talking about two interactive simulations that we developed at Select to measure a person’s ability to multitask effectively.  One of the simulations is more relevant for manufacturing environments while the other is designed for call centers.  Technology is making it easier for us as test developers to come up with creative, interactive solutions to address specific assessment issues and multitasking lends itself to such an approach.