This paper analyses three types of recruitment policies followed by a number of organizations. The constant threshold policy employs a fixed (over time) criterion for selecting among applicants, whereas the time-varying acceptance policy permits small adaptations in acceptance standards over time to reflect changes in the inflow of applications. Finally, ranking policies in which all applications are saved till the end of the decision period and then processed, are examined. While the latter typo of policy is clearly optimal if no attrition occurs, i.e. if no applications are withdrawn because of unnecessary delays in processing, it is shown that this type of policy becomes sub-optimal if a small amount of attrition starts to occur