I actually think creating a page for each staff member, of a page type (like 'staff') is actually a really good way to handle this. Here's some benefits:

- You can easily create and add further attributes down the track, without having to do any coding.
- You can add a file attribute to the page to be able to add a staff picture
- You can add the page to the composer, giving you a really nice interface for adding future staff members
- You can use a page-list block and a custom template to output your staff list. You can easily make different templates for different purposes, including a drop down.
- If you want, you can actually make the pages themselves useful. You could have the staff page type automatically display the contact information, but you could have extra info there, a contact form, etc.
- It's not a big deal to exclude these pages from the nav, sitemap and search index.
- You could create a staff search quite easily too. (you can customise the search box only search a part of the tree, and you could customise the output to not link to the pages).

It actually makes no difference that you have an extra page in the system, we're only talking a few records in the database. As long as you keep the sitemap nice and tidy, I think the benefits of using pages greatly outweigh any negatives.