Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Using those numbers, you could potentially evaluate and hire a lot of people in a month.

Those, 1 and 4 hours, are base times. You can use GURPS rules for rushing or taking extra time, and taking extra time is of course very valuable if it can mitigate intrinsic difficulty penalties.

Also, I think it's fairly realistic. I'm no expert on H.R., "human resources", but my guess would be that the reason modern day companies often have huge H.R. departments is in order to comply with huge amouts of laws, including anti-discrimination laws created to protect minority applicants. Well, that, and maybe also screening hundreds or sometimes thousands of written applicants, many of which may have been submitted simply to meet a quota from welfare recipients, without the sender actually being genuinely interested in the job, let alone meeting even basic qualifications.

But if the huge government-iduced workload is removed (not that I don't sympathize with attempts to protect vulnerable individuals against discrimination and bias), and if there's no flood of perfunctionary "welfare requirements" applications, then I don't see why a qualified H.R. admin can't screen 25-30 applicants per week, on a 40-day work week.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Probably the time should vary quite a bit by how simple or complex your skill and personality requirements are. Do you need to establish that someone would make a decent deck hand? Or whether he could be the chief architect and desginer over a public works project where he'd employ five thousand men, including a multinational team of inventors, engineers and other experts?

Yes, of course.

I read a BBC news article a day or two ago, about the transition in the UK from nepotism to merit-based hiring (they called it meritocracy, but I use that word in a different sens), inspired by the Confucian Chinese examination system.

That's hiring on the basis of intelligence tests, in a roundabout way (where instead of testing IQ directly, they test whether you've graduaded college), and looks a lot nicer than nepotism, but I do think nepotism may have a little merit. If you've hired one really skilled engineer or physician, you might be able to ask him for recommendations about who else to hire, in his field (just keep in mind that Albert would never recommend Bob, and vice versa).

The article also touched upon subjects such as loyalty and trust. If you hire your friend's nephew, and your friend knows about it, then there's a lot of pressure on the nephew to stay loyal. If he screws up, or even more so if he screws you, it'll reflect badly on his entire clan.

GURPS core already has a Loyalty score concept, intended to be used for hirelings, although much isn't done with it. And I haven't read SE closely so I can't say if the Loyalty rules are expanded on there. But even as just a basic stat, it's something you can roll for during difficult time, and your chose of hiring procedure can also skew the Loyalty tendence of your hirelings. Upwards or downwards. For instance, if you cast spells on the applicants, that may have an offputting effect.