For this weeks new decision making technique, I’m going to use grid analysis to compare different potential employees. Grid analysis is a decision making technique based on the idea that each option in a decision has a variety of factors that are important to you. We are hiring a research scientist at work and it’s a great opportunity to use this technique.
We have four applicants, call them ‘Carol’, ‘Mike’,'Betty’ and ‘Joe’. As a research scientist a lot of their work will be in Excel and Word, but they will also be my understudy for SAS and SPSS work. Since I will be working almost exclusively with them, I’ve been given nearly full reign in deciding who we hire. I’ve created a list of factors that I think are most important.
Factors for Grid Analysis
- Initiative
- Desire to learn
- Personality
- SAS Skill
- Excel and Word
- Gut
I’ve included gut because I want to explicitly recognize that it is important how we first react to someone, but also want that reaction to be separable if necessary. We know from our automatic associations that our gut reaction can be very good, but can also lead us to making serious mistakes.
Grid Analysis
Begin by creating a matrix with each option on the side and each factor along the top. Then score each option on how it performs for a given factor.
There are (at least) two ways of approaching this: you can make it binary by marking 1 if the option has that factor and 0 if it doesn’t, or you can give it a score on a scale (from 0-5 for example). The binary method is simpler, but the scoring method allows a finer level of detail. Here I’m going to use a scale from 0 to 5.
Grid Analysis for Hiring
| Initiative | Learn | Compatible | SAS | Excel | Gut | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carol | 5 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| Mike | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Betty | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Joe | 4 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2 |
Now just count the points for each option:
- Carol: 21
- Mike: 22
- Betty: 16
- Joe: 18
So by this method Mike looks like the best option, though Carol is a close second. But we can see that Mike only beats Carol because our gut reaction to him was very positive. If we don’t want to trust our hiring to this gut reaction, we can perhaps call them back for additional interviews or create another method for breaking what is essentially a tie.
There’s a slightly different version that I’ll talk about in which you weight the importance of each factor and calculate a relative score.
Have any of you used this process before? I’d be interested in knowing what for and how you liked it.
-zot
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