This applet demonstrates the probability of selecting the best option from a series of choices. In a hiring simulation, the user sees a series of candidates with each ranked relative to the others already interviewed. For each candidate, the choice is either to hire the candidate or not hire and interview the next candidate. With each hire, the rank of all candidates, including those not seen, is shown. The number of best candidates and the average ranking is tabulated. The user can select the number of candidates to be interviewed. The simulation can also be automated to select top-ranked candidates after a fixed number of interviews and generate plots of successful hires versus the number of interviews.

This is part of a larger collection of applets on statistics from the California Poly San Luis Obispo.