Strategic recruitment: a new approach to finding participants for UX research
Struggling to find high-quality research participants? Stop treating recruitment as a necessary evil, and give it the strategic focus it deserves. Here’s our 9-step approach.
Within the UX research space, there are numerous platforms, panels, and agencies for participant recruitment. There are also many researchers, designers, and product owners who conduct recruiting on their own.
Despite these resources and experience, participant recruitment is the #1 pain point for many teams conducting user research.
Through our work with a wide range of teams, we have learned that frustration with recruitment is strongest when:
- The audience is hard to recruit; and
- The team lacks a shared baseline understanding of the audience.
No matter how good the recruiter or the platform, this combination will produce disappointing participants — and disappointing research.
In response to this common struggle among our clients, our team at Marketade developed a strategic alternative to the traditional recruitment approach. We also developed a process to help teams determine when this approach makes sense to use.
What Is Strategic Recruitment?
In short, strategic recruitment treats recruiting as a valuable research asset and alignment process — and invests in it accordingly. It offers a holistic, collaborative alternative to traditional recruitment.
With traditional recruitment…
- Recruitment is solely a means to an end (the research)
- The research team outsources this step if possible — to a recruiter or a platform
- Speed and cost are prioritized over quality, further creating incentives to use panels or platforms
- Team discussion of the target audience is rushed and focused on demographics
- Screening is limited to a web-based, multiple-choice questionnaire
- Rejected candidates are treated as waste, as is the screening process
- Knowledge gained throughout the process is not captured; the process starts from scratch with the next research project
By contrast, with strategic recruitment…
- Recruitment is a means to an end and an end in itself
- The research team owns recruitment — rarely outsourcing it — and allocates the time and resources it deserves
- In particular, the team invests time at the outset to gain a baseline alignment on the target audience
- Screening includes both a written survey and a phone-based interview
- The screening process is part of the research process; the team learns a lot about the audience — and about their own assumptions — as they select and reject candidates
- Knowledge gained throughout the process is captured; over time it becomes a critical, strategic research asset that informs other projects
Is Strategic Recruitment Right for You?
Strategic recruitment is a larger investment than traditional recruiting approaches, and it is not the right fit for all teams or situations. To help determine whether this approach is a good fit for your project or program, ask a series of questions in 2 areas.
1. Audience Factors
Start by estimating the difficulty of recruiting your audience. Take existing information and evaluate your audience across these criteria:
- Size — How large is your target audience? How easy is it to locate them?
- Reachability — How easy is it to reach your audience through digital communications or other sources?
- Busyness — How busy is your audience? How valuable is their time? How easy is it to get them to want to participate in any kind of research?
- Willingness — How sensitive are your research topics for this audience? How willing are they to share the information or show the tools you’ll be asking about?
- Screenability — How easy is it to screen for key factors among a larger pool of candidates? How easy is it to score and select the top candidates?
If you need to recruit multiple distinct personas or user groups for a given research project, estimate the difficulty for each one based on these factors.
An example of a hard-to-recruit audience: Fortune 500 C-suite cybersecurity executives for a research project that requires them to talk about specific parts of their security process. In particular, they are hard to find, their time is scarce, and the topic is highly sensitive.
2. Organizational Factors
Just as important as the audience is your organization’s experience with and understanding of that audience. In particular, ask about:
- Past Recruitment Experience — How many times have you recruited a similar audience for research in the past — either directly or through an agency?
- Past Recruitment Satisfaction — How satisfied have you been with participant quality when you have recruited this type of audience recently?
- Team Clarity and Alignment — Regardless of how difficult or easy the audience is to recruit, how clear is your team’s understanding of the audience? How aligned is your team on the target audience?
These 3 factors have a high degree of overlap and correlation. Generally speaking, the more experience you have recruiting this audience, the happier you are with recent participants and the stronger your team’s alignment.
If you’ve only tried recruiting them once or twice — and participants are hard to recruit — your team is less likely to have a solid, shared picture of that audience; and you’re more likely to have been disappointed by the participant quality.
How Strategic Recruitment Works: Step by Step
If your audience is hard to recruit and your team lacks a clear, shared picture of the audience, you are a strong fit for strategic recruitment. Here’s a step-by-step overview of our approach:
1. Recruitment Team Selection
- Assign a “Recruiter” who has solid experience in both user research and participant recruitment. This person will own most of the action items throughout this process.
- The Recruiter should be able to quickly understand your research goals and methods. Having run research sessions themselves, they should appreciate the research impact of a high-quality vs. low-quality participant.
- Support your lead with a “Writer”. This is typically a marketer or copywriter. Their job is to ensure that your recruitment campaigns, ads, and messages are as effective as possible at attracting and converting candidates.
- Assign a “Decider” (name borrowed from GV Design Sprint). While you may have multiple people reviewing research candidates, the Decider will have the ultimate say on who gets approved or rejected. Often this role is filled by a research lead, a product owner, or a design lead.
2. Discovery Review
- Hold a kickoff call with the Recruitment Team and other relevant stakeholders; discuss your research goals, audience, timeline, and process.
- Review relevant resources (e.g. software demo, persona documents) to get up to speed on your product and audience. also review any past recruitment efforts for similar audiences (screeners, participant lists, etc.). Build an understanding of what has worked and failed in past recruiting efforts.
3. Audience Alignment Workshop
Soon after the kickoff and before you start recruiting, hold a half-day remote workshop with your recruitment team and key stakeholders. This workshop lays a critical foundation for your recruitment efforts and the larger project. It helps your team to:
- Ensure basic alignment on project/program research goals, and understand how effective audience recruitment supports the larger project.
- Gather, document, and organize the audience-related assumptions currently scattered across your stakeholders’ minds — and flag the biggest and riskiest areas of disagreement.
- Share the knowledge of the people within your organization who have the most contact with this audience (e.g. sales reps, customer support).
- Use collaborative exercises to reach high-level alignment on your target audience and their needs and behaviors. Your goal is just enough understanding to move forward with recruiting, not detailed personas.
- Generate and prioritize high-level sourcing ideas, screening questions, and selection criteria.
- Draft a candidate rating scale, scoring system, and selection process.
- Identify the “Review Team” for candidate selection and input: this might just be your Decider, or it might be the Decider plus one or two other stakeholders.
4. Reusable Recruitment Plan
- Draft a recruitment plan that includes screening criteria/questions, sourcing plans, and proposed incentives; adapt the plan based on stakeholder feedback.
- As part of your recruitment plan, deliver a summary of the alignment workshop’s outputs. Beyond the current project, this summary serves as a useful tool for future research and recruitment.
5. Custom Sourcing
Conduct full-service, customized sourcing of participants, such as:
- Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn campaigns with advanced audience targeting, ads written from scratch, and ongoing optimization
- Live intercept ads on websites or within products
- Online/offline community outreach (e.g. industry groups, Slack channels, hobbyist forums)
- 1:1 outreach via LinkedIn, Slack, and other channels
Monitor campaign metrics and adjust your investment based on performance.
6. Advanced Screening
- Direct all recruitment campaigns to a web-based screener that includes both multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
- Review web screener responses against your recruitment criteria, and select the top respondents.
- Conduct 5–10 minute phone screening calls that you record.
7. Collaborative Review & Selection
- Use a group recordkeeping tool like Airtable to send the Review Team batches of candidates that meet a minimum scoring threshold.
- Ask the Review Team to review key candidate information, including the phone screen recording, and then quickly score the candidate and share qualitative feedback. Depending on the team’s comfort level and bandwidth, they can choose to review and score as many candidates as they like — all, some or none.
- Based on scoring and feedback from the team, the Recruiter selects the top candidates for research sessions — enough to give you backups in the event of no-shows. For judgment calls, the Recruiter asks the Decider.
8. Scheduling & Payments
- Work with your researcher(s) to set up a session scheduling process that works best for them. We typically use an online scheduling tool like YouCanBookMe that syncs with the researcher’s calendar and that allows participants to schedule their sessions.
- Create customized, automated email and/or text messages for participants (e.g. confirmation, reminder). Also, call participants to remind them of their sessions.
- Create an easy way for your researcher(s) to notify the Recruiter when sessions are complete so he/she can quickly send incentive payments to participants.
9. Final Report
Write and share a final report that includes:
- All raw data collected during the recruitment process (e.g. respondent information, screener recordings, scoring of candidates).
- Analysis of top-tier candidates.
- Takeaways and recommendations for future recruiting of similar audiences.
It took our team a lot of trial and error to discover this more strategic approach to research recruitment. We’ll continue to evolve our steps based on what we learn from our projects and from others in the research community.
What ways have you found to make your recruitment more strategic and effective? Please share them in the comments!
