Are you in the process of interviewing survey research candidates for your team? It’s harder than it sounds, right? Lots of applicants may think they have professional-level expertise, but precious few are really qualified. And screening out the unqualified ones takes time. So if you are looking for a quick and painless way to weed out candidates who lack basic survey research knowledge—we’ve got you covered! Here are 10 interview questions you can use to quickly (even by phone or Zoom) weed out quantitative research impostors:
- In what case would you recommend using a ranking question instead of a rating question?
- In questionnaire design, what is randomization and why do we use it?
- What’s the difference between branching and piping?
- What is an example of ordinal data?
- What’s the difference between median and mode?
- What is an example of a situation where you might recommend an 11-point scale versus a 5-point scale?
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- What is weighting?
- Consider this scenario: You have just completed data collection for a survey about fast food preferences. Your client wants to know how fast food preferences vary by gender. How might you go about this?
- Consider this scenario: A colleague has done a survey of 45 people to measure satisfaction with auto leasing terms. He reports that overall satisfaction is 2.
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375. What questions or concerns might you have?
- Consider this scenario: You have collected survey data from 500 people to learn about their frozen pizza shopping behaviors. You are looking to identify the combination of demographic variables that predict higher frozen pizza purchase volume.
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How might you do this?
How did they do? If they got 9 or 10 correct, your job candidate has some solid survey research expertise and just might be a research rockstar. They have appropriate knowledge and will be able to hold their own when working with colleagues, clients, and data analysis partners.
If your candidate got 5 to 8 correct, they likely have a strong grasp of questionnaire design, and some light data analysis knowledge. Depending on the position, this may be sufficient—especially if your research team includes dedicated data analysts.
What if your candidate only got 2 to 4 correct? This person may be qualified for a junior-level role.
They have some quantitative research knowledge but are not yet proficient enough to “hit the ground running.”
What happens if they have zero or just 1 correct? Keep the interview process going! While this candidate may have high hopes to one day be a survey researcher, they will require a fair amount of training and support before they are ready to be a true pro.
Check out our related video podcast here.
P.S.
How would you do on this test? Did any of the questions stump you? Would they stump your team members? Maybe it’s time to brush up on survey research skills! Try out our Intro to Quantitative Data Analysis or our 10 Point Checklist for Questionnaire Design as a start.
