Evaluate characteristics of individuals to determine needs or eligibility
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Judging the Qualities of Objects, Services, or People (4.A.2.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Determine and certify the eligibility of prospective tenants, following government regulations.
- Evaluate students' or individuals' abilities, interests, and personality characteristics, using tests, records, interviews, or professional sources.
- Determine whether clients should be counseled or referred to other specialists in such fields as medicine, psychiatry, or legal aid.
- Evaluate clients' physical or mental condition, based on review of client information.
- Analyze information from interviews, educational and medical records, consultation with other professionals, and diagnostic evaluations to assess clients' abilities, needs, and eligibility for services.
- Evaluate personal characteristics and home conditions of foster home or adoption applicants.
- Assess the suitability of penitentiary inmates for release under parole and statutory release programs and submit recommendations to parole boards.
- Monitor the academic eligibility of student athletes.
- Determine donor suitability, according to interview results, vital signs, and medical history.
- Review transcripts to ensure that students meet graduation or college entrance requirements, and write letters of recommendation.
- Determine clients' eligibility for financial assistance.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Child, Family, and School Social Workers
- Coaches and Scouts
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- Marriage and Family Therapists
- Mental Health Counselors
- Phlebotomists
- Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists
- Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers
- Rehabilitation Counselors
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assess living, work, or social needs or status of individuals or communities”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.