Interview employees, customers, or others to collect information
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 23 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 23 occupations that perform it.
- Locate vendors of materials, equipment or supplies, and interview them to determine product availability and terms of sales.
- Interview, select, and train warehouse and supervisory personnel.
- Identify staff vacancies and recruit, interview, and select applicants.
- Interview and hire workers.
- Interview and hire applicants.
- Perform specific protocol procedures such as interviewing subjects, taking vital signs, and performing electrocardiograms.
- Recruit, interview, and hire or sign up volunteers and staff.
- Interview and hire new employees.
- Investigate or interview individuals suspected of shoplifting or internal theft.
- Conduct exit interviews and ensure that necessary employment termination paperwork is completed.
- Conduct interviews to obtain information or evidence regarding communicable diseases or violations of health or sanitation regulations.
- Interview patients or their representatives to identify problems relating to care.
- Trace delinquent customers to new addresses by inquiring at post offices, telephone companies, credit bureaus, or through the questioning of neighbors.
- Question applicants to obtain required information, such as name, address, or age, and record data on prescribed forms.
- Interview credit applicants by telephone or in person to obtain personal and financial data needed to complete credit report.
- Interview benefits recipients at specified intervals to certify their eligibility for continuing benefits.
- Ask questions in accordance with instructions to obtain various specified information, such as person's name, address, age, religious preference, or state of residency.
- Interview loan applicants to obtain personal and financial data and to assist in completing applications.
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 research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
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
23 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Bill and Account Collectors
- Clinical Research Coordinators
- Court, Municipal, and License Clerks
- Credit Authorizers, Checkers, and Clerks
- Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs
- Funeral Home Managers
- Gambling Managers
- Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping
- Human Resources Managers
- Human Resources Specialists
- Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks
- Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan
- Loan Interviewers and Clerks
- Lodging Managers
- Loss Prevention Managers
- Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
- New Accounts Clerks
- Occupational Health and Safety Technicians
- Patient Representatives
- Purchasing Managers
- Social and Community Service Managers
- Statistical Assistants
- Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Interview people to obtain information”. 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.