The Hiring Problem: An Analytic and Experimental Study

Abstract

When a small, start-up company intends to grow, it has to hire employees. Because the company requires high quality staff, the employer has to interview a lot of candidates and thus, she may take long time to collect the required staff. Of course, there is another important demand which is the time taken by the hiring process which is required to be as short as possible or the company’s rate of growth which is required to go as quickly as possible. So, the company has two main demands and needs to achieve balance between them. This is an intuitive idea about hiring from which this case study problem bears its name. The hiring problem is just an abstract model of the real hiring process. It is clear that the hiring problem will not cover every aspect of real hiring processes but it investigates some important parameters under a simplified mathematical model. On the other hand, the statement of the problem - as we will see- will give a general mathematical question with many possible applications; it is relevant in many instances where one must make decisions under uncertainty.