Step 1: Set up your screener
The foundation of all successful market research respondent recruitment is a well-designed screener. A screener is a short survey designed to identify whether potential participants meet the criteria for your study, be it a focus group, online bulletin board, or in-depth interview. It helps ensure that only qualified respondents make it through, saving time and resources.
Before launching your screener, it’s important to align with stakeholders on the desired traits of your target audience. This step ensures that everyone agrees on the specific criteria for participation, which directly impacts the quality of the research insights. A well-thought-out screener design prevents costly missteps later in the recruitment process.
Start the design process in a collaborative tool like Microsoft Word. This allows stakeholders to provide detailed feedback and share notes directly within the document. Once the design is finalized, transfer it into a survey platform. For practical tips on effective survey design, check out our Six Tips for a Kill Qual Screener.
If your study requires more complex features, platforms like Qualtrics, Alchemer, or Decipher are excellent options, though they may come with high licensing costs. For simpler surveys, free tools like Google Forms often work just fine. As we’ll discuss below, Qualitative screening is often done in two parts, with a phone conversation following an initial online survey. Technical limitations of the initial screening survey can often be overcome with a couple of quick verbal questions post-survey.
Pro-Tip: Always include fields for names, emails, and phone numbers in your screener. Without this information, you won’t be able to contact participants for follow-up or scheduling. Be sure to comply with local privacy laws when collecting and storing personally identifiable information (PII).
Step 2: Start (and scale) your screening
So you’ve tested your survey a couple of times and you’re ready to rock. Now you need people to actually take it. This is the hard part. Depending how common the audience you’re looking for is, you may need to put a haystack worth of people through your screener to find the needle you’re looking for. A key term to remember here is “incidence rate” (or “IR” for short). This is the number of people that qualify for your study as a percentage of the people who took your survey. Once you know your approximate incidence rate, you can figure out how many people you’ll need to take your screener by dividing your desired number of completes by the incidence rate. Let’s try an example.
Imagine you need to recruit 25 interviews with past-3-month popcorn eaters. After running your survey for a day or two, you’re seeing that about 10% of applicants are indicating they’ve consumed popcorn in the past 3 months, giving you a 10% IR. Applying the formula above, you see that 25 / .1 = 250. So, you’ll need to find about 250 people to take your survey in order to fill the study.
Finding people who want to take your survey can be a real challenge. Professional recruitment services like QualRecruit specialize in building databases with thousands of people who sign up to be in paid studies so we can shortcut this process and also target surveys to people who are more likely to qualify. If you don’t have an opted-in database at your fingertips but still want to roll up your sleeves and try things yourself, there are a few common ways of promoting your survey you can try:
- Social media
Meta, Instagram, and TikTok are all places you can go to promote your study opportunity and the benefits of participating in your study (usually this is in the form of compensation). Subreddits like r/paidstudies are also great places to tap into communities of willing study participants.
Watch out! These channels can allow bad actors like offshore survey farms to access your screener. If you have sophisticated tools for verifying the identity and origin of survey submissions, use them to your heart’s content. Otherwise, proceed with caution.
- Sample Providers
Providers like Cint, Dynata, and Toluna can provide survey submissions at a fixed “cost per interview” (CPI). However, this method can get expensive. Also, bear in mind that not everyone who takes surveys for money will want to participate in a focus group or interview after.
- Personal Networks (Friends, Family, Customers, Colleagues)
A surefire source of sample is people who know you, know your research aims, and (hopefully) like you. Send your survey to them however a normal human would but remember: this approach may not be as scientifically robust. And if your IR is low, you may not have enough friends and family to fill the study.
Step 3: Trust but also verify
Congrats! You’ve programmed your screener and gotten it out there until you have enough qualified people to fill your study. Go have a coffee… But don’t sit down for too long – there’s still plenty to do. Remember that if you’ve tied your study to cash compensation, you’ve created a strong incentive to provide misleading answers and falsely qualify for the study.
While the vast majority of survey takers are honest, you have to be prepared to protect your study from the few bad apples that will spoil the bunch. It can be a good idea to withhold one or two key open-ended questions and administer them verbally after the survey. This allows you to get a feel for the respondents’ ability to answer questions in a more qualitative environment; high quality respondents shouldn't be hard to keep up a conversation with!
The more spontaneous setting of a live conversation also gives you better insight into the truthfulness of the answers you’re being given; it is easy to tell when someone is struggling to make things up. For example, if respondents are qualifying based on a recent purchase, asking them about the product or service they bought should get confident answers. This conversation should reassure you the person on the other end is who they claim to be. Trust your gut!
Step 4: Close the deal
You’ve designed a survey, put it out there, found a qualified respondent, vetted them on the phone and all is looking good. Time to put a bow on things! This is where you tell the respondent what you’ll need them to do (whether it’s log in to a study site or visit a real location) and what they’re going to get for it. Ideally, you want to be doing this as part of the same call from step #3. It can be helpful to think of this part of the recruitment process as a form of dealmaking. You are asking the respondent to commit to an exchange of their time, effort, and availability for whatever reward you’re offering. As soon as you have an affirmative answer, the recruit is made.
Like you would in sales, make sure you show up to close the deal with a clear ask. Before you start your phone call with respondents, make sure you’re ready with the answers to the following:
- Why should they participate? This usually translates to “How much money are you offering?” (Pro tip: lead with this).
- What will the study involve (is it a group discussion or a 1-on-1? How long is it?)
- When is it taking place? If it’s a series of interviews, make sure you have an up-to-date schedule ready. If it’s online, make sure you’re communicating clearly about the time zones the study is being held in. (Pro tip for focus group recruitment: make sure everyone is instructed to arrive 10 minutes early. A couple of stragglers can really mess up a group!)
- Where is it? (Online? In-Person? How close is it to the respondent? Pro-tip: capturing a Zip code in your screener helps you anticipate the answer to this part)
- How will the respondent access the study? What is the study platform? What will the email say? If it’s in a focus group facility, where should they go in the building to find the study? How will you send payment at the end? Is it a gift card? Cash?
The sooner you can follow up on the respondent’s “yes” with an email containing all these relevant details in writing, the better your results will be.
Step 5: Don’t take anything for granted
People are busy. They get a lot of emails. Don’t expect someone to show up days or weeks later because they said they would on the phone. Follow a sequence of reminders from the initial call to ensure respondents are still planning to attend. Each step in this sequence should require active reconfirmation by the respondent. If they fail to respond affirmatively at any point and you can’t reach them, assume they will not be attending and make replacements accordingly.
Pro tip: give people a head’s up if you’re replacing them, if they do happen to show up you typically can’t get out of paying them unless you’ve clearly cancelled their session.
Let’s recap.
At its core, recruiting respondents to market research studies involves 5 steps:
- Set up your screener
Start with a design everyone agrees on. Then turn it into a live survey using the right platform for your needs and budget.
- Start (and scale) your screening
Once you have the screener built, start getting it everywhere you can until you have enough qualified participants to fill the study
- Trust but also verify
Verify participant answers, usually with a brief phone call
- Close the deal
Give each respondent the key study details and secure their commitment to attend
- Take nothing for granted
Remember to constantly reinforce your research participants' commitment to show up. It goes away with time.
Does this sound like a lot of work? Luckily for you there’s an easier way:
Call QualRecruit
Let us take care of your market research recruitment needs.
