The Human Resources department at your company has asked you to assist in the task of determining the starting salaries that should be offered to management trainees. In the past, the HR department has gathered information from some management trainees, who reported the name of a competitor from which they received another offer and the size of their starting salary. The HR department thinks that these statistics may be biased and wishes to approach the whole task more systematically. This is why it has enlisted your expertise to determine the situation with respect to the last group of trainees hired.

Describe how you would select a sample of respondents to answer the problem of starting salary offers.

What kind of nonsampling errors would you anticipate occurring with your approach, and how would you control for them?