Technology-enhanced assessments for selection and development have increasingly flourished over the past several decades. Sophisticated assessment programs that weren’t possible even a few years ago can now be assembled and launched on a global scale to measure almost any attribute in any language with greater realism, efficiency, and precision than ever before. As a new generation of technology-driven applications comes of age, a host of new issues and opportunities have emerged which require assessment professionals to respond with an informed perspective that balances business’s return-on-investment priorities with appropriate professional and scientific rigor.

As I write this column, we are just one month away from the 2019 SIOP Conference, where we will be announcing the first Visionary Grant Call for Proposals.  The $100,000 grant will be funded, like so much other work, by I-O professionals and their friends and supporters.  But this is the first venture in which crowd-sourcing and donor-direction play major roles.

The purpose of this article is to provide an alternate perspective to the state of living wage research found in Reburn, Moyer, Knebel, and Bowler (2018).   These authors (cl)aimed to “hope to inspire research into the motivational impact associated with Living wage” (2018, p. 1).  However, that research is already well under way, in applied psychology (Smith, 2015), across SIOP (Scott, 2017), in SIOP publications (e.g., Gloss, Carr, Reichman, & Abdul-Nasiru, 2016), and by SIOP at the United Nations (e.g., SIOP, 2016; UNDP, 2014).  Our purpose in this collegial rebuttal is not simply to repeat the information already available in these publications and SIOP initiatives that span work and well-being, including occupational health psychology.  Rather, in the spirit of constructive dialogue, we review and propose revisions to Reburn et al.’s (2018) conceptualization, contextualization, and methodology. Closer inspection of extant research on living wages and well-being exposes a range of new ways to contribute nationally within the US, and also internationally toward the humanitarian goal of “Decent Work for All” (https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/sdg-2030/goal-8/lang--en/index.htm).

At the SIOP Conference in April, I’ll be wrapping up my 3 years contributing to the oversight of the SIOP Awards Committee: the first year as chair-in-training, the second year as associate chair, and this year as chair. Handing out the 2019 Distinguished Awards at the Opening Plenary on Thursday morning is a great way to finish up. As I look back on the experience, I want to highlight three things that stand out to me—and then help you think about how to get more involved in the awards program.

In 2016 a new twitter account burst on the scene claiming to be Hugo Munsterberg unfrozen after a century. Although the account is a mainstay for I-O psychology practitioners on twitter, it is not without some controversy. This may be due to a somewhat irascible nature or maybe just maybe the occasional trolling. But the account continues to grow in popularity, Hugo was (potentially) at SIOP18, and might even get confused with Elf on the Shelf from time to time.  Whoever knows who is behind the account has kept quiet. Guesses range from Mike Zickar, to Craig Dawson, to a rebranded @IOpsychgossip. Whoever the voice of Hugo is, we had the opportunity to sit down (virtually) to ask a few questions.

The following interview ensued.