Even though surveys are considered one of the cheapest and simplest research methods, finding the right participants is still a challenge, as you first need to:
- Define your research question and goals
- Select the type of survey you plan to run (qualitative or quantitative)
- Choose an appropriate panel size for your research
In fact, our 2024 State of User Research found that 57% of researchers named participant quality and reliability a top recruiting challenge. Many people mistakenly skip over these steps and prioritize selecting a recruitment channel — such as recruiting platforms, survey panels, or social media — before clarifying these details.
While choosing a channel is necessary, it’s the wrong place to start because, without defining your target audience and survey goals, you won’t know what your ideal participant looks like. This leads to wasted time, low-quality responses, and a survey panel that fails to align with your research goals.
This guide will help you avoid these common mistakes and find high-quality survey participants by showing you how to:
- Clarify your research goals to align your study with the right audience
- Define your research scope by choosing the type of survey you'll run
- Select the best recruitment method for your goals, including key features and examples from the User Interviews platform.
Book a demo with User Interviews to learn how you can find highly targeted survey participants for your research today.
Types of user research surveys: quantitative vs. qualitative
Great survey recruitment starts with clarity: what insights are you looking for, and who can provide them to you?
Specifically, start by defining your research goals and what questions you need answered. Then, you'll be able to define your ideal survey participant profile more clearly. That'll include specific criteria they need to have, such as their age, location, or work experience.
Why is defining your research goals so important? The level of insight you need directly determines the type of survey research you’ll use to collect that data.
Below, we’ll briefly cover the two survey types (quantitative and qualitative), what they are, how they differ, and why they matter so much for recruiting.
Quantitative surveys
Quantitative surveys collect data from a large, random sample to achieve statistical significance, using probability sampling to reduce bias. That typically means you’ll need a larger number of participants for your survey.
This research quantifies problems by answering questions like, “How much?”, “How many?”, or “How often?” to spot trends or measure user preferences (e.g., “What percentage of users prefer feature X?”).
There’s no perfect answer to the number of people you’ll need for a quantitative survey, but there is some data to give you a target range. The Nielsen Norman Group recommends at least 40 participants for quick checks, with a 15% margin of error, when validating a direction.
The recommended number increases to 97 participants for medium-stakes projects like design validation, and 385 for high-stakes decisions like pricing strategies.
Determining the type of survey you’re running allows you to set the number of respondents you need. This effectively guides you through the recruiting process, allowing you to choose the best source for finding survey participants.
Qualitative surveys
Qualitative surveys tend to ask more open-ended, exploratory questions to collect deeper, contextual insights from a small, targeted group. Typically, non-probability sampling is used to select participants based on specific criteria, like job role or user behavior.
This research digs into the “why” behind attitudes and behaviors, making it ideal for uncovering nuanced feedback or motivations (e.g., “Why do users abandon our app?”). People who use qualitative surveys to conduct research can adapt their questions on the fly.
We recommend the following sample sizes for qualitative methods:
Looking for something more robust and personalized to your needs? Plug in your survey details into our qualitative sample size calculator.
In many cases, researchers will run a qualitative survey with a small group to gain a deeper understanding of the respondents and identify the best questions and answers to include in a quantitative survey aimed at a larger group.
Because these surveys require more thorough, open-ended questions, your recruitment method will vary, as you’ll likely need to create more detailed screeners, refine your targeting, and offer higher incentives for participants.
3 ways to find survey participants
With your research goals, panel size, and survey type established, you're ready to recruit participants. Here are the three best ways to find survey participants.
1. User research recruiting platforms
Recruiting targeted participants for qualitative surveys is challenging because most methods prioritize quantity over quality, making it hard to find respondents who match your specific criteria.
Without a dedicated platform, you’ll likely struggle to identify participants with the right attributes, such as job role or user behavior, for in-depth insights. When this happens, you can end up with irrelevant feedback that fails to address your research goals.
Many recruitment approaches are also slow, with long wait times for responses, and often lack the quality required for qualitative surveys. Additionally, these recruitment methods don’t implement fraud prevention and detection measures, leading to unreliable data from bots or unqualified participants.
This causes delays to your research timeline, increases the number of poor-quality survey responses you receive, and leads to a higher percentage of participant no-shows and cancellations (learn more about reducing no-shows here). All these issues further increase research costs by requiring additional rounds of data collection to achieve meaningful results.
A dedicated platform like User Interviews streamlines the process by providing access to a pool of vetted survey participants tailored to your pre-set criteria, ensuring precise targeting for qualitative research.
With User Interviews, you can:
- Source participants efficiently from a panel of 6 million, filtering by demographics, behaviors, or expertise to match your survey’s needs.
- Automate screening and scheduling, using customizable screener surveys to qualify respondents and manage logistics in one place.
- Manage your research panels and integrate third-party tools into one CRM to keep your team and participants aligned.
- Distribute incentives seamlessly, offering rewards like gift cards or product access to attract committed participants while keeping costs low.
Below, we’ll explore how User Interviews can help you find quality survey participants for your qualitative research.
Recruit from an extensive pool of participants
The issue many face when building panels for surveys is that they struggle to reach the correct audience. In many cases, they end up with unqualified participants and poor quality responses that skew their data and harm their research results.
User Interviews addresses this with a sophisticated targeting system that enables you to zero in on respondents who actually match a strict set of criteria.
The platform’s Recruit tool gives you access to a massive participant pool of more than 6 million panelists who are ready to provide high-quality responses for your surveys.
Consider a real-world example from an online higher education platform that needed to survey 100 registered nurses. This qualitative study required highly specialized criteria: registered nurses in the U.S. who were interested in pursuing a nursing leadership certificate within the next year. Using User Interviews, the research team was able to source qualified participants from its panel (that includes over 76,000 healthcare professionals) through advanced targeting filters.
You can set recruitment criteria based on four primary categories (with examples added for each category):
- Demographic: Age, Gender, Marital Status, Level of Education, Race/Ethnicity, Household Income, etc.
- Professional: Employment Status, Gig or Contract Occupation(s), and Military Service Status
- Products and Services: Food Delivery Services, Online Streaming Services, Social Networking Platforms, Vehicles Currently Owned or Leased, etc.
- Technical: Browsers, Computer Operating System, Webcam, etc.
For B2B research, additional premium filters are available, including company size, industry, job title(s), and seniority.
Unlike some platforms that rely on third-party sourcing, User Interviews manages its panel directly. The fraud detection model has been trained on 20 million unique data points, maintaining a fraud rate of less than 0.3%.
For instance, the use of generative AI to respond to screeners is a growing problem. Our platform's automated fraud detection can identify and highlight any copy-pasted screener responses, allowing researchers to flag them for further review.
Once you set your required participant count, the platform starts matching your research study immediately. The median time until you get your first qualified match is one hour. Additionally, 99% of all sessions receive positive feedback.
After choosing the number of participants you need and setting your targeting criteria, it’s time to create screener surveys to filter out unqualified participants.
Create custom screener surveys to find the best candidates
Screener surveys, or ‘screeners,’ are your chance to set strict parameters for your research so that only the most qualified participants can catch your attention. Taking the time to create your screener surveys is one of the best defenses against low-quality participants and inaccurate survey results that skew your research.
Not only do screeners help you get better participants for your surveys, but they also allow you to imagine the ideal participant so you can craft the correct questions that focus on behavior, psychographics, and how they use specific products or services.
With User Interviews, you can design screeners with a variety of question types, like multiple-choice, open-ended, or matrix questions. For instance, if you're surveying users of a nutrition app, your questionnaire can ask about their favorite meals or dietary restrictions.
Inputting screeners into User Interviews is simple, even for non-technical users, because of the drag-and-drop interface. After you create a screener, you can save it as a template, so you won't have to build new ones from scratch in the future.
Researchers can add as many screening questions as they want, it's generally recommended to limit them to 15 questions or fewer so participants are more likely to complete them.
Our automatic qualification marks participants as qualified or unqualified after they complete a screener, enabling you to quickly contact approved candidates for your research.
There are additional survey options, such as skip logic and double screening, that can improve your recruiting efforts and help to find more qualified participants.
- Skip-logic: Customizes survey screener experiences tailoring the flow of questions based on participants’ prior responses. This ensures only relevant candidates proceed for qualitative research.
- Double-screening: Validates survey participant identity and prevents fraud by verifying screener-qualified candidates through email, phone, or video responses before final approval.
With User Interviews, you can also create opt-in forms to grow your survey panel. The platform allows you to customize questions to attract the right participants from any source. Whether you’re targeting niche audiences or scaling up, these tools enable you to find the best survey candidates quickly while keeping your research on track.
Automate participant session scheduling
Typically, researchers need to switch between platforms to create surveys, set up screeners, find participants, and schedule their survey sessions for approved candidates. This tends to get frustrating because it adds additional work, leads to poorer participant quality, and results in higher no-show rates.
User Interviews’ scheduling tool solves this by automating session bookings and integrating directly with your preferred calendar. Simply connect your calendar (such as Google or Outlook), set availability preferences, and let the platform book qualified respondents into your survey sessions.
You can invite collaborators to align schedules and adjust time slots if their availability changes. This maintains flexibility, which is critical for more niche qualitative surveys.
User Interviews also allows for manual scheduling, giving you more control over your calendar. But users tend to see the best results when they implement the rules-based automated scheduling feature, which includes settings such as:
- A minimum scheduling notice
- Project start and end dates
- Start time increments
- Maximum number of sessions per day
And if you do have participants cancel, there is a simple rescheduling feature available for both the research team and the participant.
Set up incentives that attract high-quality participants
Incentives are how you’ll attract quality survey participants, and User Interviews automates the process, allowing you to set the reward, choose a distribution method, and the platform handles the rest so you can focus on other aspects of your survey.
First, you'll choose one of two ways to handle the incentive payout process:
- Automatically distribute incentives: User Interviews will handle incentives for you and distribute them on your behalf. This option allows participants to select from a range of rewards or currencies after completing the survey. There are over 1,000+ incentive types available.
- Manually distribute incentives: This allows you to choose how you'll pay participants, and once the survey is completed, you can manually send payments. Tip: It’s recommended to send payments within 10 business days.
User Interviews supports multiple currencies, such as USD, CAD, GBP, AUD, and EUR, and automatically converts payments to the participants’ local currency.
User Interviews also allows you to adjust incentive amounts mid-project to boost participation, particularly for complex surveys that require professionals or longer sessions.
Users can also focus on retention and participant engagement with User Interviews. You can automate branded thank-you emails for participants once they complete a survey. Engaged respondents are more likely to provide thoughtful, high-quality survey data or come back in the future to participate in additional research projects.
Integrations with third-party tools
Managing multiple tools for survey research, such as separate platforms for surveys, third-party calendars for scheduling, and CRMs for participant contact info, creates inefficiencies that delay recruitment and data collection.
User Interviews streamlines this by offering integrations with popular tools, such as Google, Zoom, and Salesforce, to consolidate your workflow into one platform.
You can create and distribute surveys seamlessly with integrations like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Alchemer, and other survey platforms, automating participant tracking and response access within User Interviews. These survey tool connections, available on any plan, ensure you recruit and engage high-quality participants without juggling external platforms.
Calendar and meeting integrations with Google Calendar, Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Outlook and Teams enable effortless scheduling by syncing availability and generating meeting links for survey sessions. These tools, available to all users, eliminate manual coordination, saving researchers time when conducting moderated surveys.
Additionally, you can set up various data integrations with Salesforce, Zapier, and Census, allowing you to sync CRM data and keep participant records up to date, as well as target specific survey audiences.
In total, there are 21 integrations available. Have a tool integral to your workflow that’s not listed? You can request additional integrations.
By centralizing survey creation, scheduling, data collection, and recruitment, User Interviews streamlines participant recruitment in one place.
Ready to connect with the right participants for your research? Book a demo and get started with User Interviews today.
2. Post surveys on social media
Posting on social media platforms is a popular choice to recruit participants if you need a larger number of respondents for quantitative surveys.
The fastest way to get started is just to share or post your survey link in relevant groups on Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Slack, or other social platforms. This allows you to reach a broader audience pretty quickly without spending a dime.
While recruiting survey participants through social media is cheap, it often takes longer to gather sufficient responses, as engagement depends on group activity and user interest. You may also struggle to ensure participants are qualified, as social media users may not match your target criteria or may respond without fully understanding the survey’s purpose.
There’s also an increased risk of fraud, such as AI-generated responses or bad actors, because you don't have an automated system in place that detects suspicious behavior.
Social media is certainly a viable channel for survey recruitment, but it requires extensive manual effort to recruit and manage survey respondents. Plus, if you don't already have a pre-existing, engaged social media following, you’re often reaching cold traffic—people unfamiliar with your brand or research who may be less motivated to participate. This can result in a lower response rate and fewer relevant responses for your surveys.
Since social media is a broader recruitment tool, it’s most useful for quantitative surveys that require a large sample size. You can pair social media as an organic channel with other online survey tools or recruitment methods to fill out your panels.
3. Buy survey respondents
Many researchers turn to paid respondent panels or marketplaces to quickly recruit participants. While this can help you reach participants fast and keep costs down, participants will likely be of low quality and not align with specific market research needs.
The respondents from these panels are typically pre-screened for broad demographics but lack precise targeting for niche studies. For instance, you can typically request an extremely broad panel (such as “software engineers” or “men over the age of 35”) or a slightly specific one (“software engineers in Texas” or “single men in the USA over the age of 35”).
That'll give you a large enough group of respondents for a quantitative survey, but it won’t help you find the perfect participant that meets highly specific, pre-defined demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral criteria.
Not only that, but there are still extensive manual steps to be done, such as scheduling sessions with participants, creating the surveys, sending session reminders to avoid no-shows, and distributing incentives. When you buy survey respondents separately, you’ll still need to rely on a disjointed tool stack to manage this entire recruitment process.
Because the targeting is broader, this method is better suited for quantitative surveys, where less specific targeting and broader candidate pools are acceptable to gather large-scale data.
However, this can certainly be a fast way to get a list of participants for your own survey. In most cases, respondents on these lists are used to answering surveys, so it's possible to extract valuable insights for your research.
But since there's no way to 100% guarantee that the participants are your target market, this tends to be a much less reliable survey recruitment channel compared to user research recruiting platforms like User Interviews.
Find more high-quality survey participants to improve your research
The quality of your survey participants can make or break your research (garbage in = garbage out), so it’s crucial to start with a clear strategy that allows you to recruit the right audience.
User Interviews simplifies the recruitment process by allowing you to choose the right survey type (quantitative or qualitative) and create a precise participant profile, thereby improving targeting for more effective recruitment.
With User Interviews, finding high-quality participants becomes seamless—our platform offers access to a diverse, vetted participant pool and intuitive tools to streamline screening, scheduling, and outreach, ensuring your research delivers actionable insights with minimal hassle.
Ready to ditch time-consuming DIY survey recruitment methods? Book a demo with User Interviews today.
