Questionnaires | SEEK Developer

A job ad may specify a questionnaire to include in SEEK’s Apply Form. Candidates complete the questionnaire as part of their job application, and their responses are made available through the Optimised Apply use case. Questionnaires are rendered on SEEK’s candidate website and in our mobile apps.

By integrating questionnaires into your posting flow, you can enable hirers to:

View and select question suggestions from SEEK’s library of commonly used and relevant questions.
Add custom questions if they do not find the questions in SEEK’s existing library to be relevant.
Select preferred response choices for each selected question.
Attach a company privacy policy if applicable.

Data structure

An ApplicationQuestionnaire is represented as an immutable collection of components.

ApplicationPrivacyConsent allows the hirer to link to a privacy policy for candidates to consent to.
ApplicationQuestion allows the hirer to ask a screening question:
FreeText presents the candidate with a free text input labelled with the question’s questionHtml. They must input at least one character before submitting their application.
SingleSelect presents the candidate with a set of mutually exclusive choices. They must select a single choice before submitting their application.
SEEK renders these questions either as radio buttons or a dropdown list, depending on the number of choices.
MultiSelect presents the candidate with a set of non-exclusive choices. They must select at least one choice before submitting their application.
SEEK renders these questions as a list of checkboxes.

SingleSelect and MultiSelect questions may be suggested from SEEK’s library via the applicationQuestionSuggestions query or created as custom by the hirer during the job posting flow.

Questionnaire submission association

A candidate’s questionnaire submission can be retrieved through the Optimised Apply use case. The submission can be correlated back to the presented questionnaire and its individual components.

Preferred choices & scoring

The SEEK API can optionally calculate a numeric score for each questionnaire submission. This requires that your software indicates which response choices are preferred by the hirer. The calculated score and preference indicators are not otherwise used by SEEK.

Each SingleSelect and MultiSelect ApplicationQuestion specifies a collection of possible choices through the responseChoice field. An ApplicationQuestionChoice can be preferenced by setting its preferredIndicator during questionnaire creation. Candidate responses are scored against these preferred choices.

The ApplicationQuestionnaireSubmission schema definition details scoring of the overall questionnaire submission
The ApplicationQuestionResponse schema definition details scoring of individual questionnaire components

These scores are provided as an advisory screening indicator for the hirer. All candidate applications will be delivered to your software; SEEK does not support knockout questions and does not reject applications based on score.

Limits

The SEEK API imposes the following limits on questionnaires:

56 KiB for the create mutation input
100 total components
1 PrivacyConsent component
99 response choices for SingleSelect or MultiSelect components.
1,000 characters for the ApplicationQuestionInput.questionHtml field
255 characters for every other text field, which is our default limit

Lengthy application forms deter candidates from applying, so we encourage hirers to keep their questionnaires short and focussed.

Immutability

For an equitable screening process, a SEEK job ad presents the same questionnaire to all applicants. This is enforced in two ways:

The ApplicationQuestionnaire object is immutable.
The updatePostedPositionProfile mutation will fail if a seekApplicationQuestionnaireId field is provided.
To avoid confusion, your software’s frontend should not allow hirers to modify a live job ad’s questionnaire.

Implementation options

The SEEK API supports multiple options for implementing questionnaires.

Option 1: Questionnaire Panel

SEEK strongly recommends using the Questionnaire Panel for your integration. It will significantly reduce development time and ongoing maintenance, as well as provide an up-to-date user experience for SEEK hirers.

SEEK offers a Questionnaire Panel that you can embed into your posting flow.

Jump to the panel section to get started.

Option 2: Map existing questions in your ATS

If your software already has a mechanism for creating and managing questions, you can reuse them by internally mapping to the SEEK API’s questionnaire structure.

Jump to the ATS Screening Questions section to get started.

Job posting features: Application methods

Questionnaires: Panel