Your Supplier Questionnaire isn't Diligence. It's a Performance.
By Nina Benders, Head of Partnerships at givvable
Last week at ProcureCon Asia, I walked on stage in front of around 200 procurement leaders, held up a supplier sustainability questionnaire, and asked one question: does anyone recognise this?
Many hands in the room went up, as well as hearing a few groans.
If you work anywhere near procurement, sustainability or supply chain, you know exactly what that form is. It's how we ask suppliers to prove they're doing the right thing — on human rights, climate, ethics and governance. We send them out by the thousand. And the uncomfortable truth is that most of them don't work.
Start with the cost: 40,000 people working full-time, every working day of the year, doing nothing but filling in and checking surveys. There are only about 44,000 listed companies in the world, and it's mostly the larger ones that run supplier questionnaire programmes. If each surveys, conservatively, a thousand suppliers a year, and each questionnaire takes an hour or two to complete — before you add the time the procurement team spends chasing and checking the responses — you land at roughly 80 million hours a year. And after all that effort, the data often isn't even reliable.
Why the questionnaire fails
The questionnaire has two problems, and they sit on opposite sides of the same page.
On one side, the people writing the questions often don’t know exactly what to ask, so suppliers receive vague, generic, sometimes bizarre questions. One that genuinely appears on these forms: "Are there any children working in your factory?" I’ll let you guess how many tick "yes."
On the other side, every answer is self-reported. We are asking the company being assessed to grade its own homework — and it knows you're the buyer, and that its revenue depends on the answer. So they tell you what you want to hear. That isn't data. It's a performance.
Then come the practical failures. Response rates that struggle to achieve 30% mean the majority of your supply base — and your risk — is simply invisible. Annual surveys give you a snapshot, not continuous data.
The stakes have never been higher
This would be a manageable annoyance if the world were standing still, but it isn't. We are living through what the World Economic Forum has called a polycrisis — climate shocks, conflict and disruption compounding one another, sanctions increasing — supply chains have never been more exposed.
At the same time, regulation keeps advancing, whatever the political weather. There are now more than 2,520 policies worldwide tied to responsible sourcing, and over half require disclosure. Europe leads, but Asia Pacific is close behind with 28% of the policies coming from this region. And it doesn't just apply if the regulation comes from the country you are operating in: rules like the EU's due diligence directive, the EU Deforestation Regulation and the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act reach you the moment you export — and the burden of proof sits with you. If you fail to comply, your product may well be stopped at the border. These obligations cascade: if your customer is in scope, so are you.
In other words, the information you need from your suppliers has never been more complex, more consequential, or more in need of being credible. And in this age of AI, we are trying to solve it with an outdated tool, that keeps us all busy with unreliable data.
Flipping the script
So what actually works? In my experience, credible supplier engagement needs four conditions — and the traditional questionnaire breaks all four.
- Honesty. Suppliers should be answering to a neutral third party, not to the customer who controls their revenue. Remove the conflict of interest and honest answers become possible.
- Benefit, not burden. If a supplier gets nothing back for the effort, why would they engage properly? Taking part has to be worth their time.
- Fill the expertise gap. Many poor answers aren’t dishonest — they’re simply uninformed. Good engagement teaches suppliers what "good" looks like.
- One to many. A single supplier profile that serves all of a supplier's buyers, instead of a hundred customers sending a hundred slightly different forms. Do it once; everyone benefits.
Same goal, completely different architecture.
Read the credentials — don't request them
Before you ask a supplier anything, most of what you need already exists in the world.
Every supplier leaves a trail of verifiable proof — certifications, accreditations, memberships, public commitments. An ISO certificate. B Corp status. A science-based climate target. That information can be gathered independently, from public registers, certification bodies and industry sources, and kept continuously up to date — with no survey, and no effort from the supplier at all.
This is the model we've built at givvable: verifiable supplier credentials aggregated from more than 3,000 independent sources — over 850 million data points across 8 million suppliers, roughly 60 times the coverage of the largest sustainability rater. It means you can see a supplier's real, verified position first, and use engagement to fill the gaps, rather than opening every relationship with a blank form.
And when engagement is designed around those four conditions, suppliers actually take part. We've seen engagement rates above 90% with clients in Asia — arguably the hardest region in the world to do this — against the 20–30% a questionnaire typically manages. It works, in part, because we've automated the process and made it free for suppliers to build and share a single profile: they get rewarded for the work they've already done, and the network effect does the rest.
What I'd leave you with
Three things:
- Due diligence is no longer optional. The regulatory wave is here, and today's complex world makes supply chain resilience no longer optional.
- The traditional tools are failing — and most of us already know it, think about how many would answer yes to the question if there are any children working in your factory?
- Engagement beats enforcement. You cannot audit or interrogate your way to a credible supply chain. You build a system suppliers want to be part of.
It's 2026. We have AI that can read a thousand documents in a second. We can stop emailing each other spreadsheets and asking suppliers to swear they're behaving — and stop spending the equivalent of 40,000 full-time jobs a year on data that isn't even true.
The questionnaire had its era. The next one belongs to verified data and genuine engagement.
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givvable runs a supplier engagement program that's free for up to 1,000 suppliers. If you're rethinking how you gather supplier data — or you're a supplier tired of filling in forms — I'd love to compare notes. Reach out via email at nienke.benders@givvable.com