Employer Hiring Decision Factors for Graduates in Oman

This dataset investigates employer recruitment criteria for university graduates in Oman, combining quantitative survey and qualitative interview data collected between 2020 and 2021. It includes organizational characteristics, evaluated graduate attributes, and rated importance levels. The quantitative component is structured tabular data where each row represents an organizational respondent.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between organizational characteristics like sector and size and the rated importance levels of graduate attributes such as technical skills.
• Model the influence of evaluated graduate attributes like soft skills and academic performance on hiring decision factors using Likert-scale importance ratings.
• Conduct thematic analysis on qualitative interview transcripts to explore underlying rationales for specific hiring preferences mentioned by employers.
• Compare ranking scores for different graduate attributes across public, private, and semi-government organizational sectors.

Strengths

• Data collection covers multiple economic sectors and organizational sizes across major Omani regions, ensuring diverse representation.
• The study adopted a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative breadth from surveys with qualitative depth from semi-structured interviews.
• Data cleaning procedures included checking for incomplete responses, removing duplicates, and anonymizing identifiers to ensure confidentiality.

Limitations

• The dataset relies on self-reported employer responses, which introduces potential response bias.
• Some survey entries contain missing values due to non-response to specific questionnaire items.
• The data is cross-sectional, collected between 2020 and 2021, limiting longitudinal analysis of hiring trends.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Mixed-methods research combining structured quantitative surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews with employers and HR managers.

Time Range

2020-2021

Freshness

Data collection occurred between 2020 and 2021.

Geography

Multiple regions of Oman, covering major urban and economic centers.