A Multi-criteria Phased Methodology for Personnel Selection

Many surveys say that the number one issue facing businesses is finding and keeping . good employees [8]. As the national turnover rate for all companies approaches 12 (t~ · percent, it is obvious that hiring decisions can be extremely costly to the national economy. Turnover disrupts teams, raises hiring costs and results in lost knowledge. To add to the economic pressure of making a good hiring decision, many personnel selection decisions often come in the form of a group decision making process. In a time where cross-functional teams are almost an expectation for any technical position, there are typically several decision-makers or interviewers that need to work together to make a final decision of extending a job offer. While groups have many advantages over the individual in other arenas, decision-making is not one ofthem [11]. When interviewing teams reconvene to de-brief an interview, groupthink can occur or one member of the decision team can be assertive or outspoken leading to a sub-optimal decision being made. In our research and literature review, we\u27ve found that most companies use an informal scoring method or depend entirely on a discussion process to come to a final decision. In some cases a simple weighted scoring method is used although the weights are typically not defined using any scientific method and are rarely constant throughout the process. Likewise if a company is using a rating scale and taking averages of all interviewers, it is not easy to baseline on the ranges used by each decision maker. Since the ultimate goal of the interviewing process is to assess the differences between candidates, this paper argues that a direct pairwise comparison method should be used [5]