Finding the Right Participants Part I: Choosing your approach
The most common question I get as a UX Researcher from clients, colleagues, and even friends is “but how do you actually get the people for research?!”
This is something I was a bit confused and nervous about when I first started, too, but since then, I’ve recruited hundreds (maybe thousands at this point?!) of participants, using many different approaches and seeing firsthand the benefits and challenges of each.
This post is the first part in a series about research recruitment. In this series I'll talk about not only how you can approach recruitment, but also how you can build a recruitment strategy and find the best possible participants for every project.
Internal vs. External Recruitment: Getting Started
The first major decision you’ll need to make when recruiting participants is deciding whether you’ll go the Internal or External route:
Internal Recruitment: Internal recruitment involves reaching out to participants through your existing channels. Essentially, you already own "the list" of potential candidates.
External Recruitment: External recruitment, on the other hand, entails sourcing participants from external channels. Here, you either create the list from scratch or use a third-party’s list to recruit.
Internal Recruitment Approaches
Recruiting participants that you already have some sort of connection with, either directly or through a social media or other connection, can often feel like the easiest way to get the numbers you need for your research project but its not without its challenges.
Relying on Relationships
This method involves leveraging existing relationships to recruit participants, a common practice in many organizations. A common workflow I see here is the researcher either goes to relationship holders (e.g. sales people, community managers, etc) with a list of potential participants or asks whether they have anyone in mind. The relationship holder then leads outreach and when they get some interest, puts the researcher in touch with the participant. This could also extend to personal relationships outside of the organizational context (e.g. friends and family).
Benefits of Relationship Recruitment:
More likely to get a response: If there is a relationship involved with the outreach then you’re much more likely to get a response than if they have no connection with you.
Cost Savings: You don’t need to pay for the outreach and incentives may not be required or can be minimal.
Challenges of Relationship Recruitment:
Beggars can’t be choosers: If you are bringing relationships into the equation, you may not be able to be as picky with your participants. If someone sets you up with a contact that isn’t perfect and you reject the participant, that contact will be much less likely to help you in the future. This means you’ll likely be using who you get rather than exactly who you want.
Positive Bias: You may primarily attract participants who are biased positively towards you or your organization, which can give you skewed results if you’re not careful.
Repetition: The number of relationships you can rely on are usually limited, so you often see the same individuals in multiple studies, which can skew the results.
Overburdening: Over Reliance on internal relationships may strain them, so it's essential to be cautious about overburdening your network.
Cold Outreach to Customers/Members
This method involves identifying and reaching out to potential participants from your existing customer or member lists. It often allows for a more targeted approach but still comes with its own set of challenges.
The way I’ve seen this approach work is a researcher will create a list of potential participants and then reach out to them directly, often with a screener and/or series of follow ups.
Benefits of Cold Outreach:
Precise Targeting: You can reach out to exactly who you want.
Some Cost Savings: Again, you don’t need to pay for the outreach, but since there’s no relationship, you’ll likely need to incentivize people to participate.
Challenges of Cold Outreach:
Precision is dependent on your data: If you don’t have the data on your users to be able to target them, you won’t be able to narrow things down ahead of time.
Limited Pool: You're confined to your existing lists.
Extreme Opinions: You may attract participants with extreme opinions, both positive and negative.
Time and Expense: Expect a low response rate, necessitating a large list, multiple messages, and participation incentives.
Create Your Own Panel
Creating your own panel involves recruiting potential participants into a dedicated panel first and then recruiting from that panel, as needed.
Benefits of Creating Your Own Panel:
Speed and Cost Efficiency: It can be fast and cost-effective on a project-by-project basis.
Relationship Building: It doubles as a relationship-building tool.
Challenges of Creating Your Own Panel:
Additional Work: Maintaining the panel requires ongoing effort to keep participants engaged.
Scale Issues: Ensure you have a sufficiently large pool to avoid repeatedly engaging the same individuals.
Over-Engagement Risk: Be mindful of overburdening your customers with requests.
External Recruitment Approaches
Increased interest in talking with existing and potential customers has led to an increase in platforms for recruiting participants, making the process easier and more cost effective than ever; however, it’s definitely not a perfect solution for every project, and it’s important to understand the benefits and challenges to this approach before committing.
Panel Recruitment
Panel recruitment involves people opting in to be research participants for a third party, and you then recruit from this pool. Examples of Recruitment platforms with a panel include UserInterviews, Respondent, and UserTesting.com. All-in-one unmoderated platforms would fall under this umbrella, as well.
Benefits of Panel Recruitment:
Speed and Ease: It's often the quickest and easiest way to recruit participants. Participants are ready and waiting to do research and they are incentivized by the platform to show up and be engaged in the sessions.
Relative Cost-Efficiency: Panels are relatively cost-effective both in terms of participant incentives and overall expenses.
Challenges of Panel Recruitment:
Limited Pool: If your target population is small, they might not be on the panel.
Scammers: Panels can attract individuals trying to game the system for research incentives, requiring careful screening.
Bespoke Recruitment
Bespoke recruitment involves creating a list of precisely the participants you need and then reaching out to them directly. Think of it as starting from scratch in terms of building your participant list. This approach is usually handled by an agency but could be managed in-house.
Bespoke Recruitment is often necessary for B2B recruitment, but rarely needed for B2C.
Benefits of Bespoke Recruitment:
Targeted Selection: You get precisely the participants you want.
Ideal for Rare Participants: It's often the only option for recruiting rare or high-value participants, such as CEOs or people with a very specific, professional or personal niche.
Challenges of Bespoke Recruitment:
Expensive & time-consuming: This is the most time consuming and expensive approach because of the heavy research and outreach overhead, as well as a high inventive requirement (you’re contacting them out of the blue so they’re not likely to be willing to help out of the kindness of their hearts).
Incentivizing: Even if you offer a good incentive, getting participants to actually show up can be a challenge. Participants may prioritize other commitments over your research sessions due to their lack of pre-existing relationships with you or the recruiter.
Other Recruitment Approaches
Some teams take a much less formalized approach to recruiting participants. For example, there’s the “man on the street” approach, asking people they can get to talk to them literally on the street or somewhere similar.
There’s also a “test my app for a coffee” approach where you post up somewhere people already are and let them come to you. I’ve actually done this before and as long as you choose your location wisely, it can be pretty effective!
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all method for research recruitment. The right approach for your project and organization depends on weighing the benefits and challenges of each method. By carefully considering your goals, resources, and target audience, you can choose the recruitment strategy that best aligns with your research objectives, ensuring that you collect trustworthy and valuable insights for your projects.
