A Multicriteria Model for Personnel Selection in Maritime Industry in Greece

The quality of staff is of paramount importance in all businesses. However, in maritime industry it is crucial due to the nature of the business itself. Employees' lives could be exposed to risk, let alone that huge assets are in stake, if poor decisions are made. Employing quality and professional human resources requires a personnel selection process that would evaluate the best suited personnel, dealing with the consideration of both qualitative and quantitative criteria. However, despite the significance of the maritime industry worldwide, research is needed in order to investigate the criteria upon which maritime management could rely when selecting their human resources. This paper aims at developing a multi-criteria model for personnel selection in the maritime industry, based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), chosen for its ability to incorporate multiple subjective opinions into a solid decision model. A novel criteria ranking technique based on Correspondence Analysis (CA) was added to the process in order to select the most highly evaluated criteria through a powerful data-driven method which does not rely on a-priori scales. Data was collected by interviewing experts from 14 maritime companies in Greece. The resulting model was validated by comparing its results against previous cases of successful employment. The results indicate that criteria such as trustworthiness, responsibility, capabilities in decision making, team spirit and communication skills are among the most important traits that companies look for.