Modeling Employee Choices
Every day, employees make choices. Many of these choices carry significant implications for organizations. In a highly competitive environment, knowledge of employee preferences and how these preferences influence their choices (e.g., to join or stay with an organization) is crucial to hiring and retaining top talent. Unfortunately, this knowledge often comes too late, after a decision has already been made.
Further, understanding how these decisions may change in response to modifications in an organization's personnel policies can be challenging. An effective means by which organizations can address these issues is through modeling techniques such as discrete choice modeling that systematically relate employee preferences to actual choices.
HumRRO, under contract to the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), recently employed such a modeling approach to investigate the implications of changes in the U.S. Army's recruiting policies. Faced with a difficult recruiting environment, the Army is moving to increase the cap on recruiting bonuses from its current maximum of $20K to $40K. Raising the bonus cap carries significant implications for the Army's ability to meet its personnel needs. To more fully understand these implications, the Army was interested in answering the following questions:
- How would the raised bonus cap impact applicants' job choices? Specifically, would the raised bonus cap channel Army applicants into higher priority jobs and longer terms of service (TOS) and away from lower priority job options?
- Would forecasted increases in the pool of Army applicants, resulting from the raised bonus cap, offset potentially adverse channeling effects on the Army's accession goals for lower priority jobs?
From there, HumRRO extended these simulations under different scenarios, where the raised bonus cap was expected to expand the Army's pool of high quality applicants.
- Raising the current bonus cap to $40K is projected (a) to increase overall Army accessions, and (b) to uniformly channel applicants, particularly high quality applicants (e.g., those with some college), to higher priority jobs and to somewhat longer TOS.
- The forecasted increase in the number of high quality applicants resulting from the raised bonus cap has the potential (a) to further increase high quality accessions, and (b) to mitigate the potentially adverse channeling effects on lower priority jobs.
