Customizable Spreadsheet Template: Employment Candidate Evaluation

This model provides a framework for rating employment candidates based on multiple weighted evaluation criteria. You specify the evaluation criteria, the relative weights of the criteria, and the rating for each candidate on each criterion. The model optionally provides a summary sheet for each candidate with detailed ratings on each criterion and commentary that lies behind the ratings.

Some people have an uncanny ability to pick good performers. However research shows that subjective opinions from personal interviews in general do less well than many objective measures of performance for decisions regarding employment, school admissions, and promotion, when follow-up studies compare actual results. People do a reasonably good job of evaluating one performance dimension at a time; but they are less effective at integrating several performance criteria. This conclusion holds across many if not all domains of human decision-making.

This model is inspired by research in cognitive psychology on how people make decisions, as summarized in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes (2001). Hastie and Dawes recommend replacing subjective integration of multiple decision criteria with weighted linear models of the general type used in this application.