Improving Personnel Selection Through Value Focused Thinking

Abstract

Personnel selection has always and will continue to be a challenging endeavor for the military special operations. They want to select the best out of a number of qualified applicants. How an organization determines what makes a successful candidate and how to compare candidates against each other are some of the difficulties that top tier organizations like the special operations face. Value focused thinking (VFT) places criteria in a hierarchal structure and quantifies the values with criteria measurements, known as a decision model. The selection process can be similar to a college selecting their students. This research used college student entry data and strategic goals as a proxy for special operations applicants and standards. It compared two case studies of college admissions selection criteria. A sample pool of 8,000 select and 24,000 non-select candidates was generated from real world datasets. VFT was applied to develop a valid admissions selection process model. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to sample applicants from the generated pool and examined how accurately the models were able to select the correct applicants.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 22, 2018
Accession Number
AD1056322

Entities

People

  • Joshua D. Deehr

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Facilities
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Case Studies
  • Data Mining
  • Department Of Defense
  • Game Theory
  • Governments
  • Instructors
  • Military Training
  • Operations Research
  • Personnel Selection
  • Students
  • Systems Engineering
  • United States
  • United States Government
  • War Colleges

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Psychometric Testing or Psychological Assessment.