Interviews

To obtain the full flavour of a role, it is best to interview role holders and check the findings with their managers or team leaders. The aim of the interview is to obtain all the relevant facts about the role to provide the information required for a role profile. It is helpful to use a checklist when conducting the interview. Elaborate checklists are not necessary; they only confuse people. The basic questions to be answered are:


1. What is the title of your role?

2. To whom are you responsible?

3. Who is responsible to you? (An organization chart is helpful.)

4. What is the main purpose of your role, ie in overall terms, what are you expected to do?

5. What are the key activities you have to carry out in your role? Try to group them under no more than 10 headings.

6. What are the results you are expected to achieve in each of those key activities?

7. What are you expected to know to be able to carry out your role?

8. What skills should you have to carry out your role?

The answers to these questions may need to be sorted out – they can often result in a mass of jumbled information that has to be analysed so that the various activities can be distinguished and refined to seven or eight key areas.

The advantages of the interviewing method are that it is flexible, can provide indepth information and is easy to organize and prepare. It is therefore the most common approach. But interviewing can be time-consuming, which is why in large role analysis exercises, questionnaires as described below may be used to provide advance information about the job. This speeds up the interviewing process or even replaces the interview altogether, although this means that much of the ‘flavour’ of the job – ie what it is really like – may be lost.

Questionnaire

Questionnaires about their roles can be completed by role holders and approved by the role holder’s manager or team leader. They are helpful when a large number of roles have to be covered. They can also save interviewing time by recording purely factual information and by enabling the analyst to structure questions in advance to cover areas that need to be explored in greater depth. The simpler the questionnaire the better. It need only cover the eight questions listed above. 

The advantage of questionnaires is that they can produce information quickly and cheaply for a large number of jobs. But a substantial sample is needed, and the construction of a questionnaire is a skilled job that should only be carried out on the basis of some preliminary fieldwork. It is highly advisable to pilot test questionnaires before launching into a full-scale exercise. The accuracy of the results also depends on the willingness and ability of job holders to complete questionnaires. Many people find it difficult to express themselves in writing about their work.