100 Job Strategies
100 Job Strategies · 85 of 100
The Industry Survey
Ask 100 companies one interesting question, publish the answers, send everyone the report.
In short
Running a survey gives you a legitimate reason to contact a hundred companies, a reason to contact them again with the results, and a published report that makes you the person holding the data. Three touchpoints with a hundred organisations, all of them welcome.
The situation
A cold email to a hundred companies asking about jobs produces perhaps two replies and a great deal of silence.
A cold email to a hundred companies asking one interesting question about their industry — with a promise to share the aggregated results — produces thirty responses, because people like being asked their opinion and the report is worth having.
Six weeks later the same hundred companies receive the finished report. That is a second welcome contact.
Now the person who ran it has a published dataset nobody else holds, thirty warm contacts, and a reason to be cited whenever the subject comes up.
Why this works
A survey is one of the few pretexts for mass outreach that recipients genuinely welcome.
The request is small, flattering and useful. Answering three questions costs a few minutes, being asked for your professional view is pleasant, and receiving aggregated findings about your own industry has real value. That combination produces response rates that no job-seeking outreach approaches.
It also creates a second contact that is entirely natural. Sending the finished report to everyone who participated, and to those who did not, is expected rather than intrusive — and by then you are someone who delivered on a promise rather than a stranger.
The output makes you the source. Industries run on anecdote in most areas, so a published survey with a stated methodology becomes the thing people cite and link to. That produces inbound attention from practitioners, journalists and the companies themselves.
For a job search specifically, you end up with warm relationships at a hundred organisations, most of which employ people who do what you do. Conversations with any of them start from a position of having been useful.
The effort is front-loaded and real: designing good questions, chasing responses, analysing honestly and writing it up. That is why the space is usually empty.
How to run it
- 1
Pick one genuinely interesting question
Something the industry argues about without data. Pricing practice, adoption of a technology, how hiring is changing, what tools are actually used.
- 2
Keep the survey very short
Three to five questions. Every additional question reduces your response rate substantially, and completeness matters more than depth.
- 3
Promise the results and mean it
Sharing the aggregated findings is what makes participation worthwhile. It is also your reason for the second contact.
- 4
Contact enough companies to get a usable sample
Expect a response rate well under half. Contacting a hundred to get thirty responses is a reasonable expectation.
- 5
Publish the methodology honestly
Sample size, who was asked, response rate, limitations. Transparency about weakness is what makes the findings credible.
- 6
Send the report to everyone, then follow up individually
The report goes to all participants. Individual follow-ups to the most interesting respondents are the third contact.
What to say
When it does not work
- Not delivering the report. Promising results and failing to send them burns a hundred relationships at once and is unforgivable.
- Too many questions. Response rates collapse with length. Five questions answered by thirty people beats twenty answered by four.
- Overclaiming from a small sample. Presenting thirty responses as definitive invites challenge. State limitations plainly.
- Identifying respondents without consent. Aggregate and anonymise unless explicitly permitted. Companies answer on that assumption.
- A boring question. If the answer is obvious or nobody cares, you get no responses and a report nobody reads.
One survey produces three welcome contacts with a hundred companies and leaves you holding data the industry does not have.
Questions
What makes a good survey question?
Something the industry argues about but has no data on. Whether a widely adopted practice actually delivers the benefit claimed, what people genuinely pay for something, which tools are really used as opposed to which are marketed, or how a specific practice is changing. The test is whether practitioners would be curious about the answer. A question with an obvious answer produces no responses and a report nobody reads.
How many responses do I need?
Thirty or so from a hundred approaches is a realistic expectation and sufficient for a credible report, provided you state the sample size and limitations honestly. Response rates well under half are normal for cold outreach even with a welcome request. What damages credibility is not a modest sample but overclaiming from it, so present findings as indicative of the group you surveyed rather than as definitive statements about the whole industry.
How short does the survey need to be?
Three to five questions. Response rates fall sharply with each additional question, and a survey that takes more than five minutes will be abandoned by most recipients regardless of how interesting the subject is. It is far better to have thirty complete responses to five questions than four responses to twenty. Resist the temptation to gather everything you are curious about in a single instrument.
What is the most important thing to get right?
Delivering the report you promised. Participants gave you their time on the understanding that they would receive the findings, and failing to follow through burns a hundred relationships simultaneously and permanently. It is also your entire second contact and the foundation of the third. Everything else about the strategy is recoverable; this is the one failure that cannot be repaired.
More from 100 Job Strategies
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