What is the Outreach Interview? Can I skip it?
We’re using a mix of human-crafted messages and OpenAI’s GPT to help you generate polished, personalized outreach for the peers you’re inviting to a specific survey.
While you could write your own message from scratch, the Outreach Interview offers a faster, safer, and more effective path.
It takes about two minutes (often less) to complete the outreach flow, once you’ve done your research about who you plan to invite. At the end, you’ll get well-crafted messages for your DMs, along with copy-paste-ready drafts that include unique invitation links — saving you time and preventing errors from merging links manually.
What the Survey Outreach interview asks
The interview helps you:
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Describe who you plan to invite.
You’ll list precise job titles in one question and the corresponding organizations in another. These details give texture to the outreach message, helping invitees immediately understand the relevance of the peer group and the value of the final report.
We intentionally separate titles from organizations to avoid trivial identification of specific individuals. We call this non-joinable marginal disclosure, and you can read more about how we arrived at this approach in this FAQ item. -
Explain your own motivation for creating the survey.
Transparency builds trust. Your requester details are visible to invited peers on the active survey, so this helps them understand whether the survey is directly in their field or adjacent. This is typically done in one or two sentences.
Altogether, there are 3 questions
How the outreach messages get generated
Write your inputs in the target language of your outreach. For example, while the interview interface is in English but your outreach will be in French, enter your responses in French.
After selecting your language — and, where relevant, the formality level and author gender (for languages that adjust grammar accordingly) — you’ll receive several message options with your inputs merged in. You can generate both formal and informal variants if you communicate with different peers in different registers.
Our base templates are written by humans in American English. When you select another language — or even a different variant of English, such as en-GB — our AI lightly rewrites the templates and merges in your inputs.
This produces strong semantic results rather than literal translations. If you ever see something that could be improved, please let us know.
The outreach template explains explains how Salary Confidential works, so invitees immediately understand that their data will remain anonymous and that they’ll receive access to the final report once enough responses are in. You never have to worry about explaining mechanics.
We never rewrite your inputs
Our AI never rewrites your inputs.
You won’t run into issues mixing languages (for example, an English job title inside a French sentence -- it will be left alone), and you don’t need to worry about the system “improving” your wording and introducing errors.
In the final step, we generate unique drafts with custom invite links
To help you save time and avoid errors — such as sending two people the same invite link, since each token can only be used once — the final step of the outreach flow provides quick copy-paste drafts, each with its own link.
As you use them, those drafts are automatically voided from your screen. You can also download a CSV file containing multiple drafts, each with a unique link.
Read our FAQ item on our single-use privacy-preserving invitation tokens.
You can bookmark this Final Draft page if you ever need more drafts. It’s also accessible from your dashboard under Outreach materials.
Re-use rules
Each peer group survey focuses on a specific, unique set of peers. Even surveys within the same parent poll will differ in their composition.
For that reason, outreach interviews are survey-specific.
If you create two peer group surveys, you’ll complete the interview twice — once for each group.