Salary survey research & actuarial recruitment marketing · Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment

The Client

Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment, a national actuarial search firm. Before I was the founder and business strategist behind 1000 Startups, I was a founder and partner there, and the salary surveys were mine – built them, ran them, defended them at conference booths against actuaries who show up to arguments with spreadsheets already open.

The Problem

Actuaries price risk for a living. Hand one of them a compensation number with no methodology behind it and watch the eyebrow go up. Some recruiting firms across industries publish “salary guides” – most are lead-gate PDFs dressed up as research, three vague bands and a form to fill out before you can see them. That doesn’t survive contact with someone who has passed four actuarial exams and reflexively distrusts round numbers.

What I Built, In Order

• Real respondent data, layered on top of proprietary placement data from actual searches – not guesses, not scraped job postings.
• Cut by the variable that matters. Not just years of experience – exams passed, credential earned (ASA, FSA, ACAS, FCAS), because two actuaries with the same tenure and different exam counts are not the same hire.
• Split by employment type. Consulting pays differently than insurance, which pays differently than reinsurance. Blending them into one number is how you lose the room.
• Four practice areas, not one. Property & Casualty, Life, Health, and Pension each got their own survey, because a Health actuary reading a P&C table just closes the tab.
• Free and ungated. Eleven downloadable PDFs, no email wall. The trust was the product; the recruiting pipeline was what trust bought us.

What the Numbers Said

• Reported as the middle 85% of all compensation (base plus bonus) – wide enough to be honest, narrow enough to be useful.
• Eleven survey cuts across four practice areas, refreshed every year so the numbers never went stale on us.
• Became the number actuaries and hiring managers actually cited – in comp committee meetings, in offer negotiations, in Society of Actuaries hallway arguments – without anyone at Ezra Penland picking up the phone first.

The Resolution

The survey became the industry’s reference point, not just Ezra Penland’s marketing asset. Candidates used it to negotiate. Employers used it to build ranges. And every single one of them arrived at the Ezra Penland website to get it, which is the whole trick: publish the number people need, and the leads follow the number home.

If This Sounds Familiar

If your best marketing asset is something true that you’re hoarding behind a form, the fix usually isn’t a bigger campaign. It’s giving the number away and letting it do the selling for you. That’s the whole method – audit, build the credible thing, then get out of its way.