Question

After reading a recent report revealing that workplace diversity can improve the development of ideas, Quantitative Industrial (QI) decides to hire 2 recent graduates to have a better age-profile in its workforce. They interview many candidates but have settled on 5 finalists for the position. They have ranked their choices from 1 to 5.  Unbeknownst to them, each finalist has a certain probability of accepting their offer of $60,000 as the starting salary:

Candidate 1 -- 25%

Candidate 2 -- 50%

Candidate 3 -- 10%

Candidate 4 -- 0% or 100% if candidate 5 is also hired

Candidate 5 -- 50%

Question Below:

The firm does not know the probabilities of the candidates, but like any firm, they know that not everyone will accept their offer. If they guessed that each candidate had a 50% chance of accepting the position, how many candidates would they expect they would need to make an offer to in order to make two hires?

Asker note - Is it is simple as n*p and round up to the nearest whole number to account for individuals?

Answer 1