Relative Importance of Factors and Factor Families

Resource Matching identifies resources that are candidates for a given resource request, and resource request candidates for a given resource. This list of candidates should closely resemble the list that you would have created if you performed the process manually. To achieve this goal, Resource Matching takes into account the preferences of the organization and the individual user.

For example, when evaluating a resource's qualifications, the most important criteria might be whether the resource has the competency proficiency requested by the customer. You might not give as much weight to years of experience. Another company may place a higher emphasis on accomplishments. Yet another might believe that the most important criteria is a manager's resource recommendation for the assignment.

To allow for these different approaches, you can establish factor and factor family priorities as follows:

• During implementation, on the Search Configuration - Factor Weights page, you can prioritize the fit scores for search types for individual factors within factor families.

  You can define different criteria for each search type. These priorities specify the factors that are used by Resource Matching and how much weight to give to each factor.

• Users can prioritize factor family fit scores each time they search for resources or resource requests in the Staffing Workbench, Pool Manager Workbench, Express Search, or My Assignments component.

  At search time users can further refine their search by adjusting relative weight of each factor family. For example, you might consider the most important criteria for one resource search to be whether the resource has the qualifications requested by the customer. In this case you don't give as much weight to availability if you are confident that the right resource can be made available. By adjusting the relative factor family importance levels, Resource Matching gives more weight to a factor family fit score with a higher importance level than a factor family fit score with a lower importance level.

The values used to specify relative importance range from Not at all important to Much more important. If you do not want a factor or factor family to be included in Resource Matching, specify Not at all important.