My step-by-step user recruitment process

And don’t worry, I don’t have a high budget.

Source

Honestly, recruiting sucks. It is one of the most challenging, time-consuming, and tedious parts of my job. Every time a research project comes across my desk, I sigh internally thinking about the recruitment process, especially if there is a tight deadline.

Since the responsibility of recruiting will never entirely disappear, I decided it was time to implement a process. I wanted to make recruitment as easy as possible through a standardized method and with as many templates as I could. My goal was to make recruitment mindless, and something I could do on the fly, in between meetings.

Of course, not every part of recruitment can be streamlined, especially the first parts of brainstorming about which participants are best. I tend to take more time in the beginning stages to ensure the right participants are selected to get the most optimized research results. Below is my thought process before I even begin writing an email to potential participants:

Before recruiting

Approximate your user
Before we even start recruiting, we have to understand who our users are so we can optimize our recruiting efforts. Talking to the right people is a fundamental part of doing proper research. If you don’t end up talking to the “right” people, your research may result in a complete waste of time and effort. What are some ways to do this?

• If you don’t already have personas or a target audience, take a day to sit in a room and define your target user. Bring in internal stakeholders that may have a good idea of who the target user will look like (such as marketing, sales, customer support), and come up with proto-personas. These are, essentially, wireframes of personas that consist of hypotheses about who your user is, and are a great starting point for who you should be talking to
• Look at competitors similar to you, and recruit based on their audiences. You can even recruit people who use the competitor’s product, and during the interview, ask them how they would make it better — a bit of a bonus!
• Sit down with the team who requested the research and ask them what type of participants and information they need. Is there a particular behavioral pattern? Is it necessary they have used your product (or a competitor’s product)? Do they need to be a certain age or hold a specific professional title? Gathering this information will ensure you write a great screener, which will collect you the best participants

My Step-By-Step Recruitment Process

Once I have my screener survey written, I am off to the races. Well, the slow races. I will take you through a sample project I recently, to illustrate how I am currently recruiting participants. And, as I mentioned, the budget is small.

Sample Project: We want to test a potential product concept idea with 7–10 users of our platform. Ideally, they will have traveled three or more times in the past three months, and have bought tickets through our website or app. Ideally, this research will be completed and reported on in three weeks.

1. Approximate the user. Since this particular project came with predefined criteria, it was easy for me to set the underlying demographics. We needed a mix of our current users for a product idea. Recently, we had decided to focus on a slightly younger demographic, so I included that strategy in my decision as well.
2. Create a screener survey. Once I had the basic idea of who I wanted, I went ahead to start forming questions to get me the right participants for the project. I knew it had to be people who traveled three or more times in the past three months, and who have used our website/app to do so. I asked for demographic information, such as age, gender, and income, to understand how different users interact with our website/app. I then put this on Google Forms to easily send a link for people to fill out, which is free! See my example screener here.
3. Pull newsletter subscriber emails from the CRM. Since I now work in the EU, GDPR rules are more strict than in the US. I can’t merely spam people who use our website/app. To get around this, I work with the email marketing team to pull newsletter subscriber emails from our CRM. When users sign up for our newsletter, they give us the right to contact them for user research sessions.
4. Individually email users screener survey. With these emails in hand, or rather, anonymized on my computer, I set aside a large chunk of time to email each user. Since we can pull up to one thousand emails at once, I usually leave this task for the later afternoon, when my brainpower is already going downhill. In this email, I include a link to the screener survey, why we are contacting them, and, of course, compensation.
5. Post a recruitment survey via HotJar. We were fortunate enough to get a business subscription to HotJar finally. They have a portion of their product dedicated to recruitment surveys, which pop up on the website. I include the screener survey there.
6. Respond to any email inquiries. My Google form responses come in nicely to Google sheets, where I can see all of the information beautifully laid out. For everyone who “passes” our criteria needed for the study, I reach out to them with the session information, a consent form, and reiterating compensation. For those who do not “pass” the criteria for the particular study, I try to fit them into another research project. Also, keep an eye out for any questions potential participants might ask.
7. Email calendar invitation. I use Google Calendar to send requests. I always double-check the timing and keep a consistent format for the subject of the calendar invite: Participant name x My name: company name feedback session. Within the calendar invitation, I reiterate the vital session information (how long the session will be, my email, etc.) and include a link to a Zoom meeting. I make a separate calendar invitation in which I book a conference room and invite all my colleagues.
8. Email a session confirmation 12–24 hours before. The probability a participant will attend a research session goes up if you email them a reminder 12–24 hours before the meeting. In this email, I reiterate the necessary information, including a link to the Zoom conference room, and the consent form if they have yet to fill it out.
9. Always send a thank you email. Regardless of compensation, or anything really, I always send a thank you email to the participant no more than 24 hours after the interview. In this email, I include specific topics we discussed, as well as the compensation voucher. Additionally, I encourage them to reach out to me with any questions or feedback in the future.

See all of my recruiting, scheduling and thank you email templates here.

Although it is still time-consuming, I have managed to decrease the amount of time I spend recruiting. In my case, the email templates have been especially helpful in speeding up the process. In the time since I started, I have managed to convince the team to invest in some great time-saving (and free/cheap) recruitment tools:

• Calendly
• Doodle
• Google Forms
• Typeform
• Zoom video conference
• HotJar

As tricky as recruiting can be, it isn’t impossible with a tight budget, or as a team of one. Just hunker down, create some streamlined templates, and enlist your patience.