Raab, Raymond LO'Brien, A. MaureenKotamraju, Pradeep2024-08-092024-08-091999https://hdl.handle.net/11299/264783The year given (1999) is an estimate.A programming approach, data envelopment analysis (DEA), will sort and rank occupations on the basis of maximizing skills required and minimizing that occupation’s wage resulting in a set of “hiring” efficiency scores. This procedure improves Borda rankings (rankings based on the average of rankings of the individual components), fixed weight, or subjective weighting schemes. In DEA the linear programming weights or coefficients are explicitly chosen to maximize the discrimination between the skills and wages. A rank correlation between the efficiency scores and various work and demographic variables is performed. The results show a negative correlation between the wage rate and efficiency scores. This implies that employers, when recruiting for workers, find it much easier to “hit the mark” in terms of achieving an optimum skill mix, for low-wage jobs than when recruiting workers for high-wage jobs. This conclusion has broad implications for career tracking and career mapping, particularly when workforce shortages make employee recruitment and retention extremely critical.enBureau of Business and Economic ResearchUniversity of Minnesota DuluthWorking Paper