Structured questionnaire

Disciplines > Human Resources > Job Analysis > Structured questionnaire

Description | Discussion | See also

Description

Understand the work by first building a list of standard questions to ask people who are incumbent in the target job. This may be laid out as a set of questions or a checklist.

You can include aspects of personality, cognitive aspects, behavioral elements and contextual variables. For example:

• Experience required and how long and methods for developing this.
• Basic levels of education needed.
• Personality factors.
• Beliefs and ways of understanding.
• Interests, hobbies, goals and other drivers.
• General motivation, for example 'high levels of enthusiasm for customers'.
• Cognitive abilities, such as logical analysis.
• Interpersonal skills, including leadership and general teamwork.
• Process structure.
• Interaction and dependency on or by other jobs and processes.
• Organizational structure and reporting.
• Use of technology and skills needed (also consider trends).
• Pay scales and methods, including extra elements such as bonuses.

Discussion

Generally, questionnaires and checklists are useful for ensuring a wide range of areas are covered across all jobs analyzed. They particularly ensure consistency when applying the same analysis to a number of people doing similar jobs.

However, if the checklist has aspects missing, then this may well be lost from the analysis. Bias in the checklist may well also lead to bias in the results. This implies that great care needs to be taken when developing the original questionnaire.

Example: O*net

See also

Questioning techniques, Interview