Questions to Ask in a Job Analysis Interview
For the HR analyst, compensation specialist or manager running a job analysis interview: sitting down with the person who does a job, and then with their supervisor, before writing or revising the job description. The questions follow the order the conversation usually takes: the duties and how the time divides, decisions and what a mistake costs, the knowledge and tools the work needs, the people and conditions around it, and a check of the current description against all of that. A shorter set for the supervisor closes the list, to be asked once you have the job holder's account in hand.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Duties
In a sentence or two, why does this job exist?
Why ask it
Open here, because the reply becomes the summary line at the top of the description. A person who answers with a list of tasks may never have been told the purpose, so ask what would stop happening if the position were left empty. Put the same question to the supervisor later and compare the two sentences.
What are the main duties of your job?
Why ask it
Let them list without interruption and write each item down in their words. Then go back through the list and ask what they actually do for each one, since 'handle the invoices' could mean keying them, approving them or chasing the ones that are late.
Roughly what percentage of your time goes to each of those duties?
Why ask it
Have them split 100 points across the list they just gave you. The first attempt rarely adds up, and the correcting is where you learn which duty was overstated. Small slices can be grouped with a neighbor, unless the duty is rare but serious, which the description should still name.
Can you walk me through your last full working day, from the first thing you did to the last?
Why ask it
A real day catches the tasks nobody thinks to call a duty: the handover, the log, the phone that only this desk answers. Finish by checking whether that day was ordinary, and if it was not, what an ordinary one would have had in it.
Which tasks only come around monthly, quarterly or once a year?
Why ask it
Interviews held in a quiet month miss the year-end close, the audit, the inventory count or the seasonal rush. Get the month each one falls in and how many days it takes over, then record it with its frequency so it does not read as daily work.
What do you produce or hand over, and who receives it?
Why ask it
Outputs are easier to verify than activities: a report, a repaired unit, a closed ticket, a signed-off batch. A count for a normal week is worth having too, since volume is one of the few facts from the interview you can check against records afterward.
How do you know when you have done the job well?
Why ask it
Targets, error rates, turnaround times and customer sign-off are standards you can write into the description, and 'nobody complains' is the absence of one. Where the job holder can name no measure, take that to the supervisor's interview and find out what they go by.
Which duty would cause the most trouble if nobody did it for a week?
Why ask it
Time spent and importance are two different rankings, and this question gets the second. A duty that takes an hour a week but stops payroll, a shipment or a filing belongs near the top of the description. Whether a duty is labeled 'essential' for accommodation or classification purposes is a separate decision, so ask whoever advises your organization on employment law how that is made.
What do you do regularly that is not written down anywhere?
Why ask it
Long-serving people pick up work by being good at it: fixing the label printer, training every new starter, being the one who remembers the old system. Record each item, then ask the supervisor whether it belongs to the job or to this person.
What have you stopped doing, or handed to someone else, since you took the job?
Why ask it
Old descriptions keep duties long after software or a reorganization removed them. Trace where each one went, because it may now need adding to a colleague's description.
How does work reach you, and how do you decide what to do first?
Why ask it
The answer shows how much of the day the person plans and how much is set by a queue, a schedule or a supervisor. Someone who sets their own priorities across competing requests is doing a different level of job from someone who takes the next item, even when the tasks look alike.
Decisions
Who do you report to, and does anyone else give you work or instructions?
Why ask it
The organization chart shows one line, and the day often has two or three: a project lead, a second site, the person who really signs the timesheet. Write down each source of direction and what kind it is, then note which one wins when they conflict.
Which decisions do you make without asking anyone?
Why ask it
Ask for two or three from the past month, with what was at stake in each. Claims of 'a lot of independence' are common. A dated example with an amount or a customer attached is what you can write into the description.
Which decisions do you take to your supervisor, and what usually happens to them?
Why ask it
Asking permission and keeping someone informed are not the same thing. If the supervisor nearly always agrees with the recommendation, record that the job recommends and the supervisor approves, which is more accurate than either 'decides' or 'assists'.
What can you spend, approve or sign for on your own, and up to what limit?
Why ask it
Get the figure and where it is written down, such as a delegation schedule or a system permission, and find out what cash, stock or equipment they are answerable for besides. Where the stated limit and the practice differ, note both and raise it with the supervisor, since that gap is not yours to close.
How is your work checked, by whom, and how often?
Why ask it
Work reviewed line by line before it goes out is closely supervised, and work that is only looked at when a customer complains is not. The last time something was sent back tells you what the reviewer is really looking for, so have them describe it.
What written procedures or standards do you work from, and what do you do when they do not cover the case?
Why ask it
Jobs differ less in whether rules exist than in how much is left to judgment once the rules run out. Ask for a recent case with no precedent and who they turned to. If the reply is 'I worked it out', that judgment belongs in the description.
Do you assign or check anyone else's work, or train other people?
Why ask it
Three things all get called supervising: showing a colleague how, handing out and checking daily work, and deciding on hiring, reviews and discipline. Note how many people are involved and whether it is all year or seasonal. How your pay structure and local rules treat each kind is for whoever owns them, so write down what happens and leave the label for later.
What is the hardest problem this job hands you, and how often does it turn up?
Why ask it
You are measuring complexity, and frequency counts as much as difficulty. A fault diagnosed from scratch every week describes a different job from one tricky case a year. What they drew on to solve it matters as well: a manual, a colleague, training or their own experience.
What is the most serious mistake someone could make in this job, and how long would it take for anyone to notice?
Why ask it
Say out loud that you are asking about the role and not about their own record, or the answer will be defensive. The two halves matter separately: an error caught the same day by a second check weighs less than one that reaches a customer, a patient or a regulator first.
When this job is done poorly, who feels it first and what does it cost them?
Why ask it
Have them trace the effect one step further than they first offer: the next department, then the customer, then the money or the safety risk. Raise it again in the supervisor's interview, where costs the job holder never hears about tend to surface.
Knowledge
What does someone have to know already on the first day to do this job at all?
Why ask it
Push for knowledge named precisely: 'accounts payable across several legal entities' is usable, 'finance background' is not. This list becomes the minimum requirements, so keep out anything the employer teaches in the first weeks.
What schooling or formal training does the work actually use?
Why ask it
Go duty by duty and have them point to where the degree, diploma or apprenticeship comes in. A qualification nobody can connect to a task may simply have been copied from an older posting. Find out too whether people have done the job well by another route, which tells you if 'or equivalent experience' belongs beside it.
What did you learn only after you started, and how long was it before you could work without help?
Why ask it
The length of that learning period is a plain measure of how much job-specific knowledge the role holds. Find out what the learning consisted of: shadowing, a course, or getting things wrong. A long answer here and a short list of what is needed on day one suggest the job is mostly learned on site, and the stated requirements may be set too high.
Which software, equipment, machines or vehicles do you use, and what do you do with each?
Why ask it
A product name alone tells you little, since entering data into a system and configuring it are far apart. For each tool ask how often, at what level, and whether training was given or expected on arrival. Have them open the one they use most and show you a routine task.
Which licenses, certifications or registrations does the work call for, and who checks they are current?
Why ask it
Sort the answers into what a regulator or insurer requires, what the employer chooses to require and what this person simply happens to hold. Requirements vary by place and industry, so confirm each one with the body that issues it or with your compliance lead before the description calls it mandatory.
What do you write in this job, and who reads it?
Why ask it
Filling in a form, drafting a letter to a customer and writing a report for a board are three levels of the same skill. Ask to see a typical example and whether anyone edits it before it leaves. The same approach works for numbers: what they calculate, with what, and who relies on the result.
Which part of the job can only be done by someone who has done similar work before?
Why ask it
This tests whether the 'three years of experience' on the old description stands for anything. If they can name the part and say what experience teaches about it, write that down in place of the number of years. If they cannot, the requirement may be habit.
If you were choosing your own replacement, what would you look for that would not show on a resume?
Why ask it
People name the abilities the job quietly depends on: patience with angry callers, noticing a figure that looks wrong, staying accurate in the tenth hour. Ask when that quality was last needed, so you can write it as something a person does and not as a personality trait.
People and conditions
Who do you deal with inside the organization, and what is each contact for?
Why ask it
Collect job titles, not names, and the purpose of each contact: passing information, getting approval, giving instruction, settling a disagreement. A list of departments is not much use until you know which way the request flows.
Who do you deal with outside the organization, such as customers, suppliers, inspectors or the public?
Why ask it
You need the frequency, the means, and whether the person speaks for the organization when they do. Someone who can commit the employer to a price, a date or a position in those conversations carries more than someone who relays a message.
Which of those conversations are hard, and what makes them hard?
Why ask it
Giving bad news, collecting money, calming someone upset and persuading a person who does not report to you are skills the description should name outright. Ask for the most recent one and how it ended. 'Good communication skills' is what gets written when nobody asked.
What confidential or sensitive information do you see or handle?
Why ask it
Pay records, health details, card numbers, bids and unreleased results each bring their own handling rules. Record the type and whether the person can change it or only view it. Which rules apply depends on where you operate, so pass the list to whoever manages privacy or security there.
How physical is the job: how much standing, walking, lifting, reaching, climbing or driving is in a normal shift?
Why ask it
Take the list one item at a time and get hours per shift for each, since 'on my feet a lot' cannot be written down, and add close visual work or fine hand work where they apply. Describe the demand of the task, not how this person happens to do it. How physical requirements should be worded for hiring and accommodation differs between places, so have the final wording reviewed by someone who knows your rules.
What is the heaviest thing you lift, carry or push, and how often?
Why ask it
Get a weight or a named object, the distance, and whether help or equipment is available. If they guess, ask to see the item or look up its shipping weight. A lifting figure on the old description with nothing on site that heavy is a requirement to take out.
Where is the work done, and what are the conditions there?
Why ask it
Prompt with specifics: noise, heat, cold, dust, fumes, heights, confined spaces, outdoor weather, long stretches at a screen. Get the share of the week spent in each setting. Ten minutes standing in the place usually corrects more than the interview does.
What hazards come with the job, and what protective gear or training goes with them?
Why ask it
Listen for the hazards people have stopped noticing: the forklift lane they cross, the late shift worked alone, the home visits made without a colleague. Check the answer against the employer's own risk assessments or safety records where they exist, and tell the safety lead about anything that appears in neither.
What are your usual hours, and how often do overtime, on-call duty, weekends or travel come up?
Why ask it
Ask about the last three months, not the official schedule. Travel needs a number of nights and whether they drive themselves. This is the line an applicant plans their life around, so it has to match what really happens.
Where does the pressure in this job come from?
Why ask it
Offer the usual sources if they stall: fixed deadlines, sheer volume, constant interruption, or the cost of getting it wrong. Each one describes a different job to a candidate. Pin down how often the peak comes, because a hard week each quarter is not the same as a hard day every day.
The description
Here is the current job description. What in it is wrong, missing or out of date?
Why ask it
Hand over a printed copy and a pen and give them a few minutes in silence. Hold this back until now: shown at the start, the document frames every answer and people describe the paper instead of the work. Before you strike a line they crossed out, check with the supervisor that the duty is gone and not just being skipped.
What does this description make sound bigger, or smaller, than it really is?
Why ask it
A document can be accurate line by line and still give the wrong picture, with a paragraph on a monthly report and one clause for the customer calls that fill the day. Set their answer beside the time split from earlier and reorder the draft to match.
Does your job title tell people what you do?
Why ask it
What they call themselves when a customer or a relative asks is the better test. A title that misleads applicants or outside contacts is worth flagging, though changing it may touch pay grades and reporting lines, so pass it on as a finding and promise nothing.
If other people hold the same title, how is their work different from yours?
Why ask it
One description often covers several people whose work has drifted apart by shift, site or specialty. If the differences are large you may be looking at two jobs, and you need to interview the other holder before writing a word.
What have I not asked about that someone would need to know to understand this job?
Why ask it
Leave a real pause after it. What comes out is often the thing the person has wanted to say for the whole hour, and it is as likely to be a duty you missed as a complaint. If it is a complaint about workload or pay, note it and say who can actually deal with it.
Supervisor
What are the three or four results you hold this job accountable for?
Why ask it
Start the supervisor's interview here, before showing them anything the employee said. Their list is about outcomes where the job holder's was about activity, and laying the two side by side shows whether both are describing the same job.
Here are the duties and time split the employee gave me. What would you change?
Why ask it
Present it as the employee's account and ask for corrections, not a verdict. Where they disagree on a percentage, ask what the supervisor has actually watched, since a supervisor's picture of the day is often built from results and not from watching. Where they disagree on whether a duty belongs to the job at all, that has to be settled before you write.
Which decisions do you expect this job to make alone, and which do you want brought to you?
Why ask it
Compare it line by line with what the employee told you. An employee who claims more authority than the supervisor grants, or who escalates what they are trusted to decide, is a gap for the supervisor to close and report back on, since the description can only record one version.
What separates someone fully competent in this job from someone still learning it?
Why ask it
The answer gives you the standard the description should be written to, which is the competent performer, not the newcomer and not the star. The time it normally takes to get there is worth a follow-up, to set beside the job holder's own estimate.
Which of the listed requirements would you waive for a strong candidate?
Why ask it
Requirements creep toward the current holder's own history: their degree, their years, their previous employer. Read the list out one item at a time and get a yes or no on each. Anything the supervisor would waive is a preference and should be listed as one.
How does this job differ from the ones just above and below it?
Why ask it
This is the question for anyone placing the job in a grade or a job family. Ask what the person one level up does that this job is not allowed to, and what this job does that the level below is not trusted with. If the supervisor cannot name a difference, the levels may exist on paper only.
What is about to change in this job over the next year?
Why ask it
A new system, a reorganization or a retiring colleague can date a description before it is approved. Write the job as it is done now, note the expected change separately with a date, and ask to be told when it happens.
How to run a job analysis interview and write up what you hear
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Setting up the study
Read the paper trail first
Collect the current description, the last job posting, the organization chart and any procedure manual for the role before you meet anyone. They will be partly wrong, which is why you are interviewing, but they let you spend the hour on what has changed instead of on what the job is called. Mark the lines you doubt so you remember to test them.
Choose who to interview
Where one person holds the job, interview that person and then the supervisor. Where many do, pick two or three who have been in it long enough to see the whole yearly cycle and who are ordinary good performers, across shifts or sites if the work differs. The supervisor comes second so you can test what you heard, and should not sit in on the employee's interview.
Say what it is for, and what it is not
People asked to describe their job by someone from HR or compensation often assume their pay, their grade or their position is under review. Tell them plainly what the study will feed into, that you are describing the job and not rating them, and who will see the notes. If the result could affect grading, say so and do not promise a direction.
Send the topics ahead
A few days' notice of the six headings on this page, with a request to bring examples of their work, tends to get you better time estimates than questions sprung in the room. Plan on roughly an hour with the job holder and less with the supervisor, and book a second short slot for checking the draft.
Getting usable answers
Ask about the job, not the person
The description has to hold for whoever sits in the seat next. When an answer drifts toward what this individual is good at or has taken on, ask whether a replacement would be expected to do the same. Keep performance out of it entirely: a job analysis that turns into an appraisal gets guarded answers from then on.
Collect a verb, an object and a reason
For each duty, keep asking until you can write what the person does, to what, and to what end: 'reconciles the daily till totals against the bank deposit to find shortages'. 'Responsible for cash' is a heading, not a duty. Words such as 'handles', 'supports' and 'coordinates' are signals to ask what their hands and eyes are doing.
Attach a frequency to everything
Daily, weekly, monthly, at year end, only when something breaks. A duty without a frequency reads as constant, and a description built that way makes a job look far bigger than it is. The percentages from the Duties questions and the frequencies should agree with each other, and where they do not, ask again.
Expect some inflation, and some modesty
A person who thinks pay is at stake may stretch a duty, and a person who has done the job for twenty years may leave out the hard parts because they stopped feeling hard. Asking for the most recent example deals with both. So does asking to be shown: the screen, the bench, the route, the file.
Take notes in their words
Write down the terms the job holder uses for systems, forms and tasks, and translate later. Read your summary of each group of questions back before moving to the next. It costs two minutes and catches the misunderstanding while the person who can correct it is still in front of you.
From notes to a job description
Reconcile the two accounts
Lay the employee's and the supervisor's answers side by side, topic by topic. Small differences in the time split are normal, and one follow-up question usually settles them. Differences about authority, or about whether a duty belongs to the job, are not yours to decide: take them to the supervisor, and to the supervisor's own manager if they stay open.
Rank duties by weight, then time
List the duties in order of importance with a percentage of time against each, and keep the list short enough to read by grouping small related tasks. Mark the ones the job cannot do without. If your organization labels duties as essential for legal purposes, ask its employment adviser how the label is to be applied before you use it.
Tie every requirement to a duty
Knowledge, skills, credentials and physical demands should each trace back to a duty in your notes. If you cannot point to the task that needs a degree, a license or a lifting capacity, question it. Rules on what an employer may require differ by country and state, so have the requirements section reviewed where you work before it is used for hiring.
Send the draft back
Give the draft to the job holder and the supervisor and ask each to mark what is wrong. Accept corrections of fact and talk through corrections of emphasis. Record who reviewed it and the date, since a description nobody can date is one nobody trusts.
When the standard interview does not fit
A job with nobody in it
For a new or vacant position, take the supervisor through the whole list, phrased as what they expect, and add the people who will hand work to the job and receive work from it. Mark the description as provisional and repeat the interview with the job holder once they have been through a full cycle of the work.
Many holders, one title
Interviewing each of forty people is rarely practical. A group session with five or six of them, working through Duties and Knowledge together, brings out the common core quickly, and a short questionnaire to the rest tests it. Keep individual interviews for the Decisions questions, where people speak less freely in front of colleagues.
The manager doing it alone
A manager updating a description for their own team is both analyst and supervisor, which removes the second opinion. Ask the employee's questions first and write up the answers before adding your own view, then have a peer manager or HR read the result. Tell the employee which parts you changed and why.
Work you cannot follow
In technical jobs the analyst often cannot judge whether a task is hard. Say so, and ask the person to compare: which tasks would they give a trainee in the first month, which after a year, which never. That ordering gives you the complexity without needing the expertise.