Integrating systems thinking skills with multi-criteria decision-making technology to recruit employee candidates

Abstract

The emergence of modern complex systems is often exacerbated by a proliferation of information and complication of technologies. Because current complex systems challenges can limit an organization's ability to efficiently handle socio-technical systems, it is essential to provide methods and techniques that count on individuals' systems skills. When selecting future employees, companies must constantly refresh their recruitment methods in order to find capable candidates with the required level of systemic skills who are better fit for their organization's requirements and objectives. The purpose of this study is to use systems thinking skills as a supplemental selection tool when recruiting prospective employees. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior research that studied the use of systems thinking skills for recruiting purposes. The proposed framework offers an established tool to HRM professionals for assessing and screening of prospective employees of an organization based on their level of systems thinking skills while controlling uncertainties of complex decision-making environment with the fuzzy linguistic approach. This framework works as an expert system to find the most appropriate candidate for the organization to enhance the human capital for the organization. Several large industries, among others, Boeing, the government such as the Army, Military Academy, and National Science Foundation, highlighted the significance of having qualified (systemic) individuals who can successfully deal with complex systems problems. The correct recruiting decision will reduce the rate of job turnover and also help organizations to eliminate unnecessary budget allocated for costly recruitment processes. The proposed framework is intended to first evaluate the pool of applicants according to their level of systems thinking skills and then rank them based on the recruitment strategy and workforce needs of the organization. To achieve the purpose of the study, two recruiting strategies are adopted from the human resource management literature 1) Job-Fit Recruiting strategy—finding candidates who are most aligned with a specific position requirement and 2) Flexible Recruiting strategy—finding candidates with the highest potentials. The proposed framework is validated using a real case study in a US large-scale organization.