Question

2. [1.1, 2.1, 2.2] In the recruitment process of a well-known Seattle hi-tech firm, résumés for a posted position are collected in an electronic drop box. An automatic sorting algorithm supervised by a junior recruiter whittles down the submitted résumés to an initial shortlist. All résumés in this shortlist go through the next three steps.

(1) Resource-type "junior HR person" checks the résumé for information about all non-technical aspects and ranks (fit ranking) all shortlisted candidates on a fit-to-firm scale. This takes about 8 minutes per résumé. (2) Resource-type "technical person" (usually with some help from the group that has posted the position) checks the résumé for evidence of technical skills and ranks the shortlisted candidates on a technical scale (technical ranking). This takes about 5 minutes per résumé. (3) There are two resources of resource-type "senior HR executive" who are charged with conducting preliminary phone conversation of about 24 minutes with each shortlisted candidate. That is, each shortlisted candidate get to have a conversation with any one of the two senior HR executives and the conversation takes 24 minutes.

To define the process boundary, we focus on three steps described above that are performed on all shortlisted candidates. Flow unit is shortlisted résumé.

(a) What is the capacity of each resource-type and capacity of the process in units per hour? Which resource-type is the bottleneck?

(b) What will be your suggestion (in words) to improve the capacity of the process? Going beyond your suggestion, if we can somehow manage to completely balance the process by redistributing work between different resource-types, what is the maximum possible capacity of the process?

Answer 1

Capacity of Junior HR :

Processsing time per person (resume) = 8 min

Capacity = 1/processing time = 1/8 = 0.125 resume per min = 0.125*60 = 7.5 Resumes per hr

Capacity of Technical Person :

Processsing time per person (resume) = 5 min

Capacity = 1/processing time = 1/5 = 0.2 resume per min = 0.2*60 = 12 Resumes per hr

Capacity of Senior HR:

2 HR each with processing time of 24 min

Capacity = 2/24 = 1/12 = 0.0833 per min = 0.0833*60 = 5 Resumes per Hr

Capacity of system is the capacity with highest processing time

So Senior HR capacity is capacity of system

Capacity of System = 5 Resumes per hr

Senior HR is the bottleneck since it is the highest processing time ie 12 minutes per resumes

b) Bottleneck time is 12 min whicle throughput time is 8min+5min+12min = 25 min. To reduce the bottleneck time, we can add another resource to Senior HR. Adding 1 more resource will increase capacity of Senior HR to 3/24 = 0.125 per min = 0.125*60=7.5 resumes per hr

This will make Junior HR and Senior HR equal in capacity and both will become bottleneck but the capacity of system will increse to 7.5 Resumes per hr from previous 5 resumes per hr.

Complete rebalancing would require more workers to different station till capacity at each workstation becomes equal. But that would add cost considerably