Recruitment is hard—how to overcome frustrating challenges.

Not to call out any of our wonderful clients, but after hearing this sentiment so often only to be met with recruitment hurdles in nearly every research project, I wanted to keep track of our recruitment stats in Q2:

• B2C restaurant chain: .8% response rate
  • We were recruiting from our client’s list of 12.5k customers. Our initial email invitation to participate in our study received 100 responses and were finally able to meet our goal of 12 interviews after many no-shows.
• B2C car dealership: 3.4% response rate
  • We were recruiting from our client’s list of 1.4k customers who had recently purchased from the company (so you would think they were more likely to be engaged). Only 48 applied to our study and only 17 (1.2%) were actually qualified.
• B2B government: .56% response rate
  • We cold-emailed 352 municipal government employees, only 2 of which responded and agreed to participate in our study.
• B2B pharmaceuticals
  • We used a concierge service with engaged experts from the industry. It took weeks to get just 3 people scheduled.

So if you’re having recruitment challenges—whether you’re an agency, an enterprise, or a start-up—know that it’s not just you. Getting customers to engage in your request for participation, fill out a screener, and then schedule a session? It’s like walking to school 10 miles, uphill in both directions. Not to mention no-shows or cancellations!

Recruitment takes a lot of work and can be stressful, especially when you’re on a short timeline or working in a highly-regulated industry like healthcare. So, we’ve found that it helps to have multiple strategies at the ready. Here are some things that we’ve tested with success:

• Self-Service Tool: We’re a huge fan of platforms, like UserInterviews, for recruiting participants. They work great for B2C work, especially when the audience you’re looking for is pretty general, so this is always our first stop, and our preference. However, tools like this often have gaps in their panels and don’t always have what we need. In our experience, different self-service tools have different specialized cohorts that not everyone has; for example, UserTesting.com has a large healthcare panel.

• Recruitment Firm: Though typically more expensive than a self-service tool, recruitment firms can often access more difficult-to-find B2B participants—either from their own expert panel or borrowing from a different firm—which takes the stress off of recruiting for us. Firms like these may have a more general panel, but many specialize in specific industries, such as healthcare.

• Customer Lists: Though recruiting from a list given to us by a client can be tough, they are also useful, especially when they’re huge, and this is really the only effective way to get your own customers engaged in research instead of just “lookalikes.” If you go this route, just make sure you’re following CAN-SPAM’s rules for contacting customers.

• Customer Panels: If you find yourself in need of research participants for the same industry/topic often, consider building a research panel. Though this is heavy up front in terms of cost and effort, it can make recruiting easier in the long term. Learn more about research panels here.

• Social Media: We’ve found that there’s a “group” for everything, and they’re easy to find on Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ve found the requirements are typically lax for joining these groups and depending on how engaged the group is, posting in one about your research effort could help with recruitment. We’ve also had luck connecting with these groups’ leaders (or other professional organizations within the industry) and asking if they’d share our screener via their newsletter.

• Cold Calling/Emailing: No one likes cold-calling/emailing, but it can be relatively easy (if not time-consuming) if the people you are looking to talk to have publicly-listed email addresses or phone numbers. For example, in a recent project on municipal government, we directly emailed specific roles that we wanted to speak to with a link to our screener. Make these emails feel as human/natural as possible, include the incentive in the subject line or as early in the email as possible, and send your screener link in the first email to reduce friction for the participant.

• Snowball Method: Arguably one of the more successful recruitment methods is getting a referral to another participant from one you’re already talking to. This can be a simple question added to the end of a discussion guide and/or a follow-up via email asking them to connect you to someone else who might be good for the study. Most people, in our experience, are happy to help, but the biggest challenge is getting them to follow through. Consider adding an incentive component to encourage this activity.

All of this to say, it’s smart to go into research knowing that you may need to engage several of the strategies listed above.

Finally, another recruitment struggle we encounter is the desire to get more participants than are truly needed, further extending the time it takes to recruit your target number of participants. ZoCo’s research is based on the concept of “just enough” participants, better known as the Pareto principle, where 20% of responses get you 80% of the insight.