Suppose that there is a program that matches newly hired employees to vacancies within an organization.
After interviewing all managers who have vacancies, applicants score (NOT RANK) the positions as either a 1 (Highly Interested), 2 (Interested), or 3 (Not Interested). The managers do the same thing.
I don't know how to explain this in formal terms, but with a fairly large group of people (~30) is there a way to maximize the number of matches where applicants who score positions as 1s are assigned to managers who rated them as 2s (and vice versa), but no applicant is assigned to a manager who rated them as a 3 or to a position that they scored as a 3?
This would reduce the number of managers and applicants who both get their first choice, but it would also reduce the number of cases where both parties get their second choice, which is preferable because of the potential negative impact on morale of having lots of 1-1, 2-2 pairings.