Data mining to improve personnel selection and enhance human capital: A case study in high-technology industry

The quality of human capital is crucial for high-tech companies to maintain competitive advantages in knowledge economy era. However, high-technology companies suffering from high turnover rates often find it hard to recruit the right talents. In addition to conventional human resource management approaches, there is an urgent need to develop effective personnel selection mechanism to find the talents who are the most suitable to their own organizations. This study aims to fill the gap by developing a data mining framework based on decision tree and association rules to generate useful rules for personnel selection. The results can provide decision rules relating personnel information with work performance and retention. An empirical study was conducted in a semiconductor company to support their hiring decision for indirect labors including engineers and managers with different job functions. The results demonstrated the practical viability of this approach. Moreover, based on discussions among domain experts and data miner, specific recruitment and human resource management strategies were created from the results. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.