When actually hiring, I care about the time value of opportunity cost. That is, we interview and get hire the first candidate that we feel can do the job well and we all otherwise like, then the benefit of having her on the job ASAP exceeds any possibly value from another candidate that might show up some uncertain time later.
There is some connection to real world hiring practices, but only if you abstract away enough: The solution to the Secretary Problem basically comes down to
1. Spend some time gathering information which will let you assess how strong future candidates are.
2. Use that information to help you decide whom to hire.
In some cases step 1 is solved by interviewing many candidates in parallel; but in most cases companies adjust their thresholds for what "good enough" is over time based on their observations of incoming candidates. They might very well reject a candidate early on and then regret that decision later once they realize that she was exceptional compared to a disappointingly weak candidate pool.
So you need not just a discrete better/worse comparison of candidates, but some linear measure of each candidate's productivity, some value for the work product, and an interest rate.
Numberphile did a nice presentation of this problem and a solution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWib5olGbQ0
(This problem is framed as hiring the best which I assume means closest to optimal weights on those non-relative benchmarks -- whatever "optimal" means.)
But your comment is interesting, as this problem was originally as "the wife problem": how do "you" -- presuming incorrectly even at the time all mathematicians to be male -- find the optimal wife.
The thing that made your comment funny to me is that in majority of marriage cases (by anyone to anyone) neither party has much, or any past experience to fall back on!