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
