Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook - Flipbook - Page 58
Tips for Constructing a
Critical Positions Survey
Develop a contact list. A quality survey begins with a
quality contact list. Start by compiling a list of businesses
and organizations in the project’s region and industry, and
include the entity’s location, contact information, number
of employees, and industry subsections. All business or
organization information must be collected legally, either
from commercial data analytics companies, such as Dun &
Bradstreet, or by obtaining clear consent. Your local chamber
of commerce may be a good resource for these contacts. It is
also important to avoid bias in the list by having a clear set of
criteria for the target audience. Clearly document the process
of creating your contact list. This will serve as a reference
to avoid duplicates and ensure that the list is unbiased.
In addition, it is important to have the survey (whether
electronic or phone) available in the multiple languages used
in your region and other modalities to ensure compliance with
the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Include these types of key questions. The survey doesn’t
need to be long, but it should include key questions to
produce useful information.
• The first set of questions should focus on the
characteristics of the responding business or
organization. This includes questions regarding
general location, industry, type of business, and
number of employees.
• The next set of questions should gather information
about the types of training programs available, the
level of education required, any anticipated change in
employee number, and the methods of recruitment.
• The subsequent questions should focus on identifying
the critical positions, wages, skills needed, and
vacancies for these critical positions, and reasons the
positions are hard to fill.
• Finally, respondents should be asked to identify
the skills that potential candidates lack and the
barriers/challenges that the business faces in
hiring new employees.
Determine how the survey will be administered. Once
the questions are ready, the survey can be built out in a
user-friendly program, such as Constant Contact or Survey
Monkey. The survey link can be sent out in emails, or a call
list can be used to administer the survey over the phone.
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CALED | Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook
When administering the survey, it is important to remain
professional and build trust with the respondent. If
sending a survey by email, the email address used to
send the survey should be reputable and clearly from
the sending organization. If the survey is administered
by phone, surveyors should introduce themselves and
their organization before asking the survey questions.
Administering surveys can require prohibitively large
amounts of time. Local universities and nonprofit
organizations may have technical assistance programs
that can be leveraged to help complete the survey efort.
It is important to specifically reach out to a human
resources representative or hiring manager to avoid
contacting respondents who aren’t knowledgeable about
workforce needs and priorities. This will ensure that the
survey respondents are familiar with these issues and can
ofer accurate information.
The survey responses should accurately reflect
the industry and region; for example, if most of the
respondents are businesses with 50+ employees, make
eforts to reach out to smaller businesses in the industry
and region. Likewise, if most of the respondents are
located in large cities in the region, focus on also reaching
the businesses or organizations in underserved areas of
those geographies and in more rural areas. This helps
avoid skewed or biased results. Some businesses in
your area may be family owned or otherwise very small,
particularly small businesses may have dificulties taking
the survey promptly.
Other businesses may be located in areas with poor or no
internet access, thus preventing them from taking online
surveys. To ensure that your data is accurate and to ensure
equitable representation for small businesses in your
survey responses, it is important to try to accommodate
businesses with limited resources. This can be done by
conducting follow-up calls or by administering the survey
via phone.
The survey eforts are complete when the number of
survey responses match the target sample size. Take time
analyzing the results.
