A Combined AHP-TOPSIS Model for the Selection of Employees for Promotion

Human resources managers grapple with the intricate task of selecting employees for promotion, a process that often consumes several months and may be prone to unfairness. The fact that employee promotion is very low in the field of Decision Sciences was a call for this paper in order to help human resources managers, based on the combination of two Multi-Criteria Decision Methods (MCDM), namely the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), to systematically choose and rank the most appropriate candidates for promotion. Initially, AHP determined the importance of diverse criteria through pairwise comparisons by elaborating the weights. Subsequently, employees were randomly chosen from a pool of potential candidates seeking promotion, and TOPSIS is used to rank the employees based on these weighted criteria. The findings indicates that reputation, Key Performance Indicator (KPI), convergence with current work, and the performance ratings of the last year emerged as the top four variables influencing the promotion decision-making process.