Question

Pareto Charts. In Exercises 11 and 12 construct the Pareto chart. Getting a Job In a survey, subjects seeking a job were asked to whom they should send a thank-you note after having a job interview. Results were as follows: 40 said only the person they spent the most time with, 396 said everyone they met, 40 said only the most senior-level person, 15 said the person that they had the best conversation with, and 10 said that they don’t send thank-you notes (based on data from TheLadders.com). Comment on the results.

Short answer

The following Pareto chart is constructed for the number of subjects corresponding to the different opinions on giving a thank-you note:

The majority of subjects who were a part of the survey think that a thank-you note should be given to everyone they meet when someone secures a job interview.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

The data for subjects and their opinions on sending a thank-you note is recorded.

Define a Pareto chart

A Pareto chart is a type of bar chart that has columns arranged from the longest to the shortest heights, from left to right. In this chart, the horizontal axis depicts the categories while the vertical axis shows the frequencies.

The length of the bars represents the frequencies for each category.

Describe the frequency distribution

The following table shows the records of different subjects in a summarized form.

Opinion	Number of subjects
Everyone	396
Person They Spent Maximum Time With	40
Most Senior-Level Person	40
Person They Had The Best Conversation With	15
No Thank-You Note	10

Sketch the graph

The data has five categories and the corresponding frequencies. The steps to sketch a Pareto chart is as follows:

• Plot the values on the vertical axis starting from 0 until 450 with a gap of 50 units.
• Mark the categories on the horizontal axis equidistant from one another.
• Draw bars of even width for each category and height same as the number of subjects corresponding to the category.
• Label the vertical axis as “Number of Subjects” and the horizontal axis as “Opinion on Thank You Note.”

The following Pareto chart is sketched:

Comment on the results

The category marked “Everyone” shows the significant difference in column height as compared to others.

By observing the plot, it can be seen that most of the subjects feel that a thank-you note should be sent to everyone they meet if someone gets a job interview.

Also, the lowest number of people respond to sending no thank-you note.