Recruitment of research lecturers in Madagascar by a multicriteria group decision support system

The recruitment of permanent Lecturers for higher education is a major challenge for all universities. Given the absence of defined hiring criteria, this article will suggest some and support the recruitment committees at the Ministry of Higher Education in Madagascar. Three methods will be implemented in a decision support system. Each recruitment committee member will assess the importance of each criterion. The Rank Sum weight method is used to determine the weightings of the criteria. The Combined Compromise for Ideal Solution (CoCoFISo) method ranks the candidates. The Minimum of rank (MIRA) method will aggregate the several rankings of candidates. Three fundamental criteria were selected: experience in university teaching, time elapsed since obtaining the teacher's opinion, and number of research publications. These criteria were assessed according to their importance by six members of the recruitment committee. The weights assigned to the criteria vary from one criterion to another and from one decision-maker to another. Applying these weights to the CoCoFISo method resulted in six rankings of the candidates. The rankings of the candidates varied from one decision-maker to another, except for the candidate in first place and the candidate in last place. The MIRA method successfully merged these six rankings into a final ranking for each candidate. The Kendall rank correlation coefficient between the MIRA method and the six rankings obtained using the CoCoFISo method varies between 0.80 and 0.97, thus confirming the validity of the rankings. This new technique will solve the challenge of hiring temporary lecturers as permanent lecturers in Madagascar universities, thanks to the transparency of the process, and will assist the Ministry of Higher Education in its decision-making.