Recruit qualified research participants, fast

There are various ways to recruit participants for research. Firstly, you need to define the audience to target (and their associated demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and professional traits), then you need to find and screen those participants either from within your customer base or through external recruitment.

User Interviews is a tool that’s purpose-built to help with recruiting participants for research—especially qualitative research, in which researchers are looking for participants who meet highly specific criteria relevant to their research question.

Other methods for research recruitment include posting Craigslist ads, sharing links to study applications on social media, recruiting user research participants by email, or contracting a user experience recruitment agency. However, these methods tend to be more time-consuming and less reliable than a tried-and-tested platform like User Interviews.

Learn more about the best ways to recruit participants for a study in our step-by-step guide to participant recruitment.

The right number of participants will depend on the type of research you’re doing and the specific methods you plan to use. Guidelines for user testing recruitment may differ from user interview recruitment. For quantitative research, the rule of thumb is to recruit however many people you need to achieve the level of statistical significance your study requires. 

But what about qualitative studies? You need to take into account the scope and goals of your research, how homogenous your participants are, which qualitative method you’re planning to use, your expected no-show rate, and other factors. It can get pretty complicated! Luckily, we’ve built a simple qualitative sample size calculator to help you determine the right number for your study.

Today, we have over 5 million participants in our database, representing a diverse group of people. We are confident that we can recruit for most studies, even the niche ones!

The best way to check the feasibility of your recruit is to launch a project. It only takes about 5 minutes, and you only pay once sessions are complete (no money upfront!) so it’s the best and easiest way to gauge feasibility. Our median time to your first qualified participant is under an hour, meaning you could get a real sense of our ability to recruit for your specific persona within a day.

If you’re looking for a more general overview of User Interviews’ participants, download our Research Panel Report for key participant stats, data on our most-requested segments, and more information about how we source and vet high-quality participants.

We do the work of building a high-quality, trustworthy panel so researchers always have a fresh pool of candidates for their studies. Our panel is 100% proprietary. We never buy audiences or source participants from third party panels. Our monthly panel growth rate is around 5%.

Word-of-mouth and social channels make up 79% of our panel acquisition. This category includes social media, influencer networks, and referrals from existing participants and researchers.

Alongside our broad recruitment efforts, we actively invest in smaller and niche markets through sponsorships, social outreach, targeted advertising, influencer campaigns, and industry-specific blogs and publications. We prioritize recruitment of niche markets based on researcher demand—meaning, if you need them, we’ll try to find them.

Learn more about User Interviews’ participants by downloading our Research Panel Report.

At User Interviews, we use fraud detection algorithms, session feedback, profile verification, staff training, and other strategies to thwart misrepresentation and inappropriate activity on our platform. These measures work—researcher feedback on our participants is overwhelmingly positive, with less than 2% of sessions resulting in negative feedback for any reason. 

Some recent investments that have significantly reduced the incidence of fraud include:

• Running checks at signup for common fraud patterns across contact information and other profile characteristics
• Automated checks for digital identity overlap with known fraudulent accounts
• Requiring re-verification of profile and contact details at certain intervals
• Increased sophistication of fraud model that flags scores above threshold based on ongoing participant activity and signup factors
• Additional project-level protections for identified at-risk projects
• Strengthened internal process for manual identification and reporting of fraud by operations team members

We intentionally don’t share all the specifics about our methods for identifying and preventing fraud, since making this information available can help bad actors to thwart the system. But rest assured, fraud is a relatively rare occurrence on our platform—of our large active population, less than 0.3% are ever flagged as suspicious. And of course, with our quality guarantee you’ll never pay for a fraudulent session.

Learn more about how we deter fraudulent participants and maintain the highest quality panel.

Using user research recruitment agencies can be a viable solution for your user research needs, but it’s not the only option. 

Some situations when you might turn to a user recruitment agency include: when you’re conducting research in unfamiliar, international markets and you need an agency with specialized knowledge of that region to handle nuances of language and culture; or, when you’re running a very niche study that requires hyper-manual legwork to pinpoint a very small population with a low incidence rate; or, if you have the budget and you just want a team of recruiters on call who will find participants, build screeners, weed out bad fits, and deliver participants for your study.

But recruiting agencies are often not the best option. If you want to get started quickly, work within a limited budget, or have more control over participant selection, working with an agency may not be viable. You may prefer to try a recruitment platform like User Interviews that can provide fast, high-quality, targeted recruitment at an affordable and transparent price.