Good user research recruitment means finding the right people for projects. However, sometimes projects require hard-to-reach profiles, unique behaviours or specific experiences. When your ideal users are more of a challenge to find, it can push back deadlines and add delays to user research projects. Or, even worse, it can compromise the results of your research.

Rather than letting this have a knock-on effect, we can tackle this problem head-on with some pro-active recruitment methodologies and ensure the recruitment stage delivers the right participants at the right time and with the right results. Let’s look at some approaches to take when dealing with complex profiles and how you can find the best participants for user research.

🪁 Personas are an aspiration

Let’s begin with a controversial question: personas – yes or no? Personas can be useful, but the problem is using them as a template instead of a goal. Personas shouldn’t be treated as the only participants worth talking to, but it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important when working with personas. Once you are knee-deep in persona-led recruitment, it can be a huge challenge to break them down and understand which characteristics to prioritise.

Speaking of terrible personas 👉

Where good personas give the right level of detail between experiences and behaviours, bad personas can mislead user research teams and render good recruitment techniques useless, meaning specific participants who are relevant for research get overlooked.

For example, when finding business participants, you might be looking for people responsible for purchasing technology for a company. Depending on the organisation’s structure, this task could be undertaken by a purchasing manager, IT manager, finance director, software asset manager, outsourced IT agency or office manager, etc. It isn’t always the case that a single job title will be solely responsible for a specific task, so focusing on experiences and behaviours rather than job titles could be the best approach.

Having a persona to guide the research set-up is a good idea, but the more layers get added to your personas, the more difficult it will be to find the right participants for your research.

🪁 Are you looking for a unicorn?

Finding participants is a numbers game: you need a good initial pool of people to be able to filter down and end up with the perfect profiles. When looking for niche groups, the best place to start is to do a bit of research around the size of your audience to determine if your ideal user group is feasible.

For example, let’s imagine you need 100 people to complete a survey about owning an electric vehicle purchased in the last year via the UK government scheme. Some quick research tells us that around 400,000 people in the UK own an electric vehicle, with 18.5% of new car buyers in 2021 opting to purchase an eco-friendly car. This already drastically reduces the amount of people out there, but then there’s the added difficulty of finding people who have purchased their vehicle with government support.

Reverse-engineering the numbers – from the number of participants needed versus the amount of active and accessible participants that exist in your desired location – will inform your recruitment strategy and help you determine how much you should be investing in free finding activities.

Another example: if we were to target people that work full-time at a university for research, we know how many universities there are in the country (164) and how many higher education staff work on a full-time academic contract (143,000). If we submit this to a database that represents the general population, we are looking for 0.25% of the population (meaning in a snapshot of 10,000 people, we are looking at 25 relevant profiles).

Something else to keep in mind: the examples above don’t consider open rates or application rates. Internally, we typically see an 8% response rate for quantitative research and 15% for qualitative research, meaning we’re going to end up with two to five profiles available and interested in taking part instead of the original 25.

The point is: finding the unicorns isn’t about sending it to everyone and hoping you get a response. You need to know where to go and how to use your resources in the most effective way possible.

🪁 The right participants might not always be available

So, you’ve found your niche participants. You know where they are, how to reach out to them, you’ve nailed the communication strategy, but… they might not be available on the dates/times you had planned. Some participants are naturally time-poor (e.g. business owners), some experience time constraints at specific times of the year (e.g. such as teachers at the start or end of terms), some are temporarily unable to attend research (e.g. new parents).

As we covered in this previous blog post by our B2B recruitment experts, finding the right participants is more important than finding the most available participants. This means researchers need to be flexible and, some times, they have to work around the participants.

Developing an ongoing relationship with a user recruitment agency definitely helps in this kind of scenario. For example, an agency can keep the participants “warm” in case you need to move them around according to your schedule.

🪁 Must-have vs. nice-to-have

To find the right people, you need to know what you are looking for, but beware of the temptation to turn nice-to-have into must-have criteria. The more you add on top of your base profile, the more challenging your recruitment will be. Instead of trying to deliver all participants that fit all criteria, try to break down your requirements and create sub-groups to achieve a final representative sample that fulfills the brief.

Check out the example on this table. We can see none of the participants fits all the criteria, but we still have a nice mix of the right participants with related differing experiences and behaviours.

There are a few benefits of working in this way, the first one being that a reason to NOT do something might be as relevant for the research as a reason to do something (e.g. participants who return items via a drop-off point versus participants that don’t do this and can explain why). The insight can be just as valuable and we can gain a different perspective, helping the research team to identify service blockers.

🪁 Flexing criteria

Adding must-have criteria layers when looking for participants that work in niche industries or fields, have very unique experiences and behaviours or live in remote locations without consistent access to the internet will make your recruitment extremely challenging. Rather than looking at must-haves and nice-to-haves, we need to go a bit further which each screening call.

It may be that there are thousands of people in your desired location that fit the criteria, but if these individuals are time-poor, you will need to be flexible; not the participants. If you can’t flex on your criteria, there are alternatives:

▪️ Can you offer a higher incentive to make the research more appealing?
▪️ Can you allow the participants to select the time that works for them instead of imposing a specific schedule?
▪️ If your research is in-person, but that doesn’t work for most participants, can you flex and go remote?
▪️ If they are not open to downloading your preferred video call software, can you run the research on a different platform, as long as it doesn’t affect the outcome?

Flexibility can look very different on a case-by-case basis. But one thing we know: the easier we can make it for participants to take part in research, the better the results and the group of users you’ll end up with.

🪁 How to get to the resolve

The end goal of user recruitment is obvious: get the right participants available at the right time to find the right insights. However, how we get there isn’t always linear.

Initial screening is required to ensure participants have the relevant experience. Once this has been established and is ingrained in the process, we need to ensure each individual has the right access to the sessions and to participate in an equal and balanced manner.

The rocks to look under

Finding participants isn’t as straightforward as posting once on Facebook or sending a one-off email to a customer list; getting the right individuals to take part in research requires time and, ideally, an existing relationship with a community.

Whether you are utilising social media, paid advertising strategies, email marketing or referral campaigns, knowing where the people you want to reach spend their time and the most accessible ways to reach them are the most important elements to sourcing the right individuals.

It may be that your audience is not online, and that is ok too. Print publications, leaflet drops and door-to-door teams can help target the right participants. While these methodologies take a lot of time and require a higher budget, sometimes there is no other way to reach specific audiences. When user researchers don’t have the time or resources to do this, user recruitment agencies can often help.

External recruitment sites like Respondent.io, UserZoom and SurveyMonkey all have their own global panels to target participants, but here you come across the same problems. The participant data pool is still extremely generic and the most available participants are not always the best. It is also hard to track how many pieces of user research participants have taken part in and whether or not they are bulk applying to projects and surveys to earn some extra income.

Sometimes inclusivity is a limiting factor (but it doesn’t have to be)

For context, inclusivity is a must in all user research. We need to think about how design, product, services and everything else will be used by everyone, but there are still some areas of our own industry that are not quite there yet with inclusivity.

When we say that inclusivity can be a limiting factor, we’re not suggesting that factors like accessibility, ethnicity or gender identity should be overlooked. Quite the opposite!

Instead of adding an accessibility layer on top of your (sometimes already niche) criteria, for some of your participants make the accessibility requirement the main recruitment criteria and then add additional requirements as a nice-to-have.

🪁 Working with user recruitment agencies

When recruiting any participants for a project, user recruitment agencies are one of the options available. No news here, but there may be a few things you don’t know if you have never worked with an agency like People for Research.

Here are some top reasons to work with a third-party, according to feedback from our clients:

▪️ Anonymity
Eliminate any bias of participants researching an organisation or product prior to the research.

▪️ Time management
Focus on more important and strategic elements of the user research project cycle.

▪️ Quality of participants
User recruitment companies may have a wider database and methods of reaching participants.

▪️ Experience
A consultative approach to user research recruitment means realistic advice on what is achievable.

There are times when you have the capability to find participants in-house, but when this is impossible due to time restrictions and niche participant criteria, it’s worth looking at external sources.

Self-service platforms can help with broad/simple criteria and general population snapshots, but they’re not always the answer. This is where specialised user recruitment agencies like People for Research come in – we recently wrote a piece on some of the questions to focus on when choosing a recruitment agency.

If you are having trouble finding participants for your next project, it may be worth talking to a recruitment agency. You can always reach out and get an idea of costs and timeframes to match your project. If you’re at this stage, get in touch with the People for Research team and let us know if you have any recruitment questions!

Jason Stockwell, Digital Insight Lead

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user research or usability testing get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with many end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.