About the Role
IANS is building an innovative new data product for security leaders. The Research Interviewer is the frontline of our data collection effort — conducting structured phone interviews with CISOs and senior security practitioners to capture detailed, verified quantitative and qualitative data on their experience with certain security-related operational tasks.
This is not a call center role. You will be having substantive technical conversations with senior security professionals about their real-world experience with key security operational tasks. You need enough cybersecurity domain knowledge to ask intelligent follow-up questions, recognize when an answer needs probing, and capture nuanced insights that go beyond surface-level satisfaction scores.
You will also serve as the key liaison between the Research team and IANS' account management team, coordinating client outreach, scheduling, and ensuring we hit our target response rates across all markets and firmographic segments.
Core Responsibilities
Interview Coordination & Scheduling (~25% of time)
- Work with sales account managers to identify the best interview contacts at each client — the person with the most hands-on experience with a given topic, not necessarily the CISO.
- Persistently follow up with AMs to get introductions made and interviews scheduled; track and escalate when outreach stalls.
- Maintain a master tracker of interviews completed vs. needed by market, product, client, industry, and revenue band to identify coverage gaps.
- Coordinate scheduling directly with practitioners once introductions are made; accommodate busy executive calendars with flexibility.
Conducting CATI Interviews (~40% of time)
- Conduct 60-minute structured phone interviews with verified security practitioners using the IANS CATI survey instrument.
- Cover all survey sections during interview (survey questions will be provided by product and research team).
- Ask intelligent, probing follow-up questions when responses are vague, surface-level, or inconsistent — the goal is detailed, usable data & insights, not checkbox completion.
- Vet any quantitative data points required from the user to ensure data is fact-based and high-quality.
- Record all interviews (with consent) and capture real-time notes during the call to supplement the recording.
- Target throughput: ~7-10 completed interviews per week (accounting for scheduling, cancellations, and rescheduling)
Data Processing & Quality (~25% of time)
- Enter all structured data from each interview into the survey platform (Qualtrics) accurately and completely.
- Edit and process verbatim quotes from interview recordings: remove filler words ("um," "you know," "like"), fix grammar, and ensure quotes are fully coherent and attributable — while preserving the practitioner's authentic voice.
- Flag data quality issues: inconsistent responses, potential conflicts of interest, respondents who lack sufficient product experience to provide reliable data.
- Ensure all interviews are properly tagged with firmographic metadata (industry, revenue band, team size) for downstream filtering
Coverage Tracking & Reporting (~10% of time)
- Maintain a real-time dashboard of interview completions by market, product, industry, and revenue band vs. target sample sizes.
- Identify gaps in firmographic coverage (e.g., "we have 15 financial services respondents but only 3 for healthcare") and work with AMs to fill them.
- Provide weekly status reports to the Research PM on throughput, coverage gaps, scheduling pipeline, and AM responsiveness.
- Flag early if target response rates are at risk and recommend corrective actions (e.g., different outreach approach, incentive adjustments, alternative contacts)
Requirements:
- 1+ years of experience conducting structured research interviews, CATI surveys, or qualitative research with senior professionals (B2B context strongly preferred).
- Familiarity with cybersecurity concepts and terminology — you don't need to be a practitioner, but you need to understand the basics and be able to facilitate a technical conversation about implementation challenges.
- Strong interpersonal skills: ability to build rapport quickly with senior executives, keep conversations on track, and ask tough follow-up questions diplomatically.
- Meticulous data entry and editing skills — comfort processing interview recordings into clean, quotable verbatim text.
- Organized and persistent: able to manage a pipeline of 30–50 scheduled and pending interviews simultaneously across multiple markets.
- Comfort working with Qualtrics or similar survey platforms for data entry.
- Based in the US (onshore requirement for data quality with technical audience)
Nice to Have
- Background in cybersecurity, IT, or adjacent technical field (even in a non-practitioner capacity — e.g., analyst, sales engineer, product marketing).
- Experience with market research firms (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, KLAS) or B2B research agencies.
- Familiarity with CATI methodology, sample management, and quota tracking.
- Experience with Bayesian modeling concepts or statistical analysis (for collaboration with our modeling contractor)
Why This Role Matters
The data you collect is the moat. Without high-quality, structured interview data from verified practitioners, this new product has no differentiation. Every interview you conduct feeds a proprietary data asset that compounds over time, cannot be replicated by competitors or LLMs, and directly drives IANS' revenue growth. This is not a support function — it is the core engine of a new product line projected to generate significant incremental revenue.
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary: $60,000–$75,000 depending on experience (plus bonus)
- Opportunity to grow into a senior research or research management role as the data collection function scales
