There is a vast ecosystem of vendors aimed at solving research recruitment for their clients. Many larger companies tend to outsource most if not all their recruitment to outside vendors.
If you have the budget, I definitely recommend outsourcing at least some recruitment. While there is an initial time investment in finding the right vendors, it’s worth building out a stable of trusted relationships in order to speed up recruitment for future projects, and to diversify your participant pool.
BENEFITS IN USING RECRUITING VENDORS
There are several benefits in using third party services that you don’t get in-house:
- Recruitment speed – once you have trusted vendors set up in your system, you can often turn around a research project quickly by tapping into their networks. For example, a self-service qual panel can let you start running subject matter expert interviews in a matter of hours.
- Expertise – a good recruitment vendor will add value by proposing recruitment strategies, providing feedback on targeting criteria, or offer other recommendations for your project. They have done this a lot, and the best vendors function as partners to help you succeed.
- Lower total cost – when taking into account the very real cost of your staff’s time, it can often be more cost-effective to outsource low value-add work like recruitment. That’s definitely not always the case, but make sure you don’t value internal time spent at $0.
- More internal bandwidth – recruitment can be massively time intensive, and internal staff time can be spent much more productively than on endless recruitment and scheduling. If recruitment becomes a blocker, you’ll end up doing a lot less of it compared with just throwing a bit of money at a vendor.
- Reach – especially for surveys, there is often no real alternative to panels or third-party vendors if you want to get enough responses.
- Reduced bias – third party recruiters can give you more unbiased respondents than in-house recruitment. So even if you are able to recruit all participants internally, it might be worth allocating some of your sample to a third party recruiter to validate the feedback you receive from internally sourced participants.
- (Partial) anonymity – an external recruiter can hide who’s requesting the feedback, and allow for more unbiased responses. You won’t be able to conduct fully anonymous research if you’re doing the actual interviews yourself, but an external recruiter allows for a degree of anonymity.
- Outsource the least fun parts of the job – anyone who’s tried to e.g. organize a focus group knows that getting all participants to show up on time (or at all) can be painful. Offloading scheduling, candidate tracking, and appointment confirmation will reduce the overhead for doing research and make it more likely that your company makes research a priority.
THIRD-PARTY RESEARCH PANELS
There are a gazillion online research panels with lists of opted-in survey respondents, segmented by pre-existing demographic and firmographic information on which you can target. Though most panels have limited B2B samples, so you are still likely run into recruitment challenges if you’re looking for narrower targets.
For B2B, I’ve had success with panel aggregators who allow you to source across multiple independent panels, as they tend to be able to fill larger B2B samples (with the downside that their panel quality is more mixed than the best proprietary panels). Two such aggregators:
There are also a bunch of proprietary panels managed by research agencies that are not part of the aggregation services. Most of these vendors claim to have unique strengths in participant quality or reach in certain sectors, though I haven’t found a great proprietary B2B panel yet (that’s not to say they don’t exist for your industry). Proprietary panels tend to be more expensive than aggregators.
Expect to pay $20+ per complete for a B2B complete through a panel, depending on survey length and difficulty of recruitment.
There are also some self-service panels where you can field your own surveys. These are rarely useful for B2B surveys, but they are cheap and allow for gradual fielding, so give them a spin if you want to experiment. I’ve used the following for B2C research:
- SurveyMonkey
- Qualtrics (accessible to Qualtrics subscribers)
RESEARCH RECRUITERS
There are also a ton of vendors who offer help with recruiting research participants through in-house contact lists, social media networks and LinkedIn. Most traditional full-service research agencies offer research recruitment as a service, as well as a lot of smaller specialized vendors. Though many vendors decline to bid for B2B projects, so the market for B2B services is smaller than for B2C.
There’s a lot of good vendors in this space – below are two recruiters I’ve had positive experience with and can recommend, but this is by no means an exhaustive list:
- Zintro – qual-only recruitment vendor. Relatively low-cost and good at recruiting challenging B2B samples. They’re a fairly small team and offer a lot of personal attention to each project.
- NewtonX – qual and quant recruitment vendor with broad coverage of B2B industries.
You can expect to pay anywhere from $600 to $1,200 per completed interview, depending on participant seniority and difficulty to recruit. There’s frequently a contractual minimum (e.g. 5 completes), with discounts for large recruits.
I have never used quantitative research recruiters, who specialize in sourcing survey participants through e.g. LinkedIn. Non-panel survey recruitment is expensive, and will likely cost you $70+ per completed survey response, so I’d suggest you repurpose your research objectives to fit a qual format if at all possible.
SELF-SERVICE QUAL PANELS
There is a set of new vendors that attempt to replicate the self-service survey panel model for qualitative research recruitment, allowing you to set up a project and start recruiting for interviews without going through a full RFP process. There are several but I’ve used:
I’ve had a good experience with, and can recommend, both companies. Both have limited B2B samples, so if you’re looking for a niche audience, you’re unlikely to be able to fill a complete study (Respondent.io currently has a larger B2B sample than UserInterviews, but that can change over time). But they’re cheap and low-risk, as you only pay for completed interviews, so I’d encourage you try them out.
Both companies work on an “participant incentive + 50% fee” pricing model, so if you offer e.g. $100 incentive to participants, you’ll pay $150 in total.
EXPERT NETWORKS
Traditional expert networks such as GLG and Guidepoint offers access to subject matter experts in pretty much any field, but unless you’re a hedge fund, you probably don’t want to pay $1,500 per interview, so these companies tend to be not very useful for day-to-day research (there might be cheaper expert networks that I haven’t encountered).
But if a topic is of burning interest, and you have the budget, expert networks are a great way to get access to senior decision makers.
CONSIDERATIONS IN THIRD-PARTY RECRUITING
- Expect vendors to over-promise and underdeliver – the only difference is to what degree they do it.
- When recruiting through a vendor, don’t hesitate to reject candidates that don’t match your profile – inform the recruiters of the reasons why you’re rejecting the candidates, so they can fine tune their criteria.
- Always recruit in waves– start with 10% of your target, review screeners and completes for quality, make adjustments, recruit another wave until you’re happy with the quality.
- Every panel struggles with participant quality – create a strong screener, build in multiple validation questions, and be ruthless about weeding out fake responses. Even with a great screener that excludes obvious spam, you will still discover that a lot of open-end responses don’t make sense in context. Remove these respondents fully, as all their other responses is suspect.
- Self-service survey panels have even more quality issues, so be extra selective. Expect 30-50% false responses.
- Be aware of PII challenges – there’s a minefield of legal and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) risks when using 3rd party recruiters. Make your legal team your best friend.
- Be very careful about providing access to your customers’ PII, such as emails, to third parties. Never give over PII without legal sign-off.
- Make sure that the vendor is contractually responsible for managing their candidates’ PII. Vendors will often attempt to assign contractual PII liability onto you, which can be a blocker in contract negotiations. Ensure your legal team is looped in and signs off on any PII clauses.
- Make sure any self-service platforms’ legal terms are signed off by your legal team before using them.
INTERNATIONAL RECRUITMENT
Ideally, you will want local input from every market you operate in, and not assume that US feedback is representative for all customers. But international research adds significant levels of complexity, which is often not feasible within the budget and timeframe of your project.
If you are a US company that want to start dipping your toes in international market research, I suggest starting with English-language recruitments in your biggest markets. Many of your international customers can likely offer feedback in English, allowing you to sidestep the issue of localization. International recruitment for English-language projects looks pretty similar to US recruitment, with some important restrictions around about PII (e.g. GDPR creates specific requirements for how PII is to be handled in the EU) and incentives (what is legal in terms of e.g. sweepstakes, tax implications of incentives, etc.), where you’ll want to loop in your legal team.
Full-scale multilingual research projects are a lot more complicated, and I wouldn’t suggest you attempt one by yourself. If you want to do multilingual research, use a global research agency and prepare for a painful budget discussion with your manager. Most larger agencies can do research in the Americas and Europe, while finding a good APAC vendor can be a bit more challenging (and good luck finding a vendor that gives you quality results in China). I don’t have specific recommendations, but I’ve worked with Kantar, Gfk, and Ipsos who are all solid global (and expensive) options.
Photo by Redd F
