Designing Pareto-Optimal Selection Systems for Multiple Minority Subgroups and Multiple Criteria

Wilfried De Corte, Paul R. Sackett, Filip Lievens

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Currently used Pareto-optimal (PO) approaches for balancing diversity and validity goals in selection can deal only with one minority group and one criterion. These are key limitations because the workplace and society at large are getting increasingly diverse and because selection system designers often have interest in multiple criteria. Therefore, the article extends existing methods for designing PO selection systems to situations involving multiple criteria and multiple minority groups (i.e., multiobjective PO selection systems). We first present a hybrid multiobjective PO approach for computing selection systems that are PO with respect to (a) a set of quality objectives (i.e., criteria) and (b) a set of diversity objectives where each diversity objective relates to a different minority group. Next, we propose three two-dimensional subspace procedures that aid selection designers in choosing between the PO systems in case of a high number of quality and diversity objectives. We illustrate our novel multiobjective PO approaches via several example applications, thereby demonstrating that they are the first to reveal the complete gamut of eligible PO selection designs and to faithfully capture the Pareto trade-off front in case of more than two objectives. In addition, a small-scale cross-validation study confirms that the resulting PO selection designs retain an advantage over alternative designs when applied in new validation samples. Finally, the article provides a link to an executable code to perform the new multiobjective PO approaches.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)513-533
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Applied Psychology
Volume109
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 American Psychological Association

Keywords

  • Pareto-optimal
  • adverse impact
  • multiobjective optimization
  • personnel selection
  • selection design

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