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Recruit qualified research participants, fast

Qualified participants lead to great insights. Find your perfect match from our 4.1 million panelists.
Target professionals and consumers in any niche
Same day matching for most audience segments
One simple tool to source, screen, schedule, and incentivize
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Trusted insight

99% of sessions get positive feedback
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Reliable panel

650K+ sessions, $39M+ incentives, <0.3% fraud rate
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Smart matching

Most advanced matching algorithm & fraud detection

We source for the world’s most customer-centric companies

How it works

Recruit participants and automate research

Target niche audiences

Precisely target audiences with a wide range of demographic, professional, behavioral, and technical criteria.

Reach hard-to-find professional segments that go beyond job-title targeting to layer on skills, seniority, industry, and custom requirements.

product shot of the project builder inside UI, where you can set parameters to target audiences you're looking for

Screen candidates

Find best-fit participants with our powerful screener surveys.

We support skip logic, advanced question types, video screening, and automatic qualification.

Verify matches with access to rich profile data, social media links, and double screening.

product shot of building screener surveys inside User Interviews

Schedule sessions

Connect your calendar to enjoy hands-off, rules-based research scheduling.

Let our system automatically book sessions for you, your participants, and every member of your team.

We even handle rescheduling and reminders to eliminate any manual coordination.

product shot of team scheduling inside UI, where you can view and select permissions for multiple researchers' calendars

Conduct research seamlessly

Run research stress-free using your tool of choice.

Our platform is compatible with any research method or testing tool, and we have direct integrations with many popular tools to make meeting links and task tracking a breeze.

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Incentivize participants

Reward your participants the easy way.

Trigger a dozen (or a thousand) incentive payments in just a few clicks to participants in over 200 countries, with 1,700+ redemption options, and with all currency conversion and localization handled by us.

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“I work in B2B SaaS and have struggled for years to get good interviewees with niche experience that aren't already customers. 

Two weeks on [User Interviews] and I have had 4 interviews with people with outstanding experience (i.e. one interviewee had 20+ years working in our target role in an ICP enterprise business). I'm honestly blown away.

-Alec L. on Trustpilot
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Audience Targeting

Target just about any niche

Get on-demand access to our massive network of research participants. Target professional segments, demographic groups, consumer behavior, or any niche audience you’re looking for.

Professional panel stats:

  • 73,000 unique occupations
  • 140 industries represented
  • 23,000 targetable skills
  • 230,000 business owners

Real recruits:

  • 12 CMOs or marketing VPs at ecommerce brands with $5M+annual revenue to give feedback on a BI platform
  • 7 DevOps engineers who regularly deploy containers to Kubernetes for an unmoderated prototype test on LookBack
  • 400 product designers who regularly use visual collaboration tools to take an 9-minute survey on Qualtrics
  • 10 decision-makers who work in the energy management space in India to participate in 1-1 interviews
Professionals
Recruitment criteria
  • Professional
  • Job titles
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Senior|
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Product Manager
Senior Account Executive
Senior Designer
...
  • Skills
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  • Company size
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  • Employment status
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  • Industry
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  • Seniority
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  • Small business owner
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  • Type of income
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  • Location
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  • Additional requirements (Must use agile project management software e.g. Jira)

Consumer panel stats:

  • 8 countries and all 50 U.S. states represented
  • 53% full-time employed, 73% attended college, 57% homeowners
  • 79% acquired through word-of-mouth or social channels
  • 4.92% monthly panel growth rate

Real recruits:

  • 32 active home buyers to participate in a virtual service demo and 1:1 interview for a financial aid product
  • 28 Minnesotans aged 45-65 who eat cereal and prioritize health for in-person product sampling and focus group
  • 35 members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have sought electrolysis for a healthcare innovation survey
  • 20 young Indian urbanites who purchase a specific brand of bottled water for a “think aloud” unmoderated brand study
Consumers
Recruitment criteria
  • Demographic
  • Age
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  • Children
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  • Gender
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  • Home owner
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  • Household income in USD
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  • Level of education
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  • Living situation
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  • Marital status
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  • Race/ethnicity
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  • Employment status
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  • Type of income
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  • Location
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  • Technical
  • Browsers
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  • Computer OS
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  • Smartphone OS
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  • Tablet OS
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Top Recruiting Features

Fine-tune your recruit and supercharge research

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Powerful screening

Screener surveys with advanced question types and skip logic
Double screening including participant video upload New
Target professionals and consumers in any niche
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Participant verification

Links to participants' social profiles for professional verification
Rich profile data on every user, so you know exactly who's in your study
Automatic qualification (for speed) or manual qualification (for control)
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Exceptional support

Exceptional support from a recruiting specialist for every project
Live chat support to get help from our team in real-time New
Communicate custom requirements for a highly-curated recruit
Talk to users today. Seriously. We’re fast.
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Recruiting FAQs

How do I recruit participants for a research study?

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.

How many participants do I need to recruit for my study?

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.

How do I know if User Interviews can source my target audience?

Today, we have over 4.1 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.

How does User Interviews grow its panel and maintain quality?

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.

How does User Interviews deter fraudulent participants?

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.

Should I work with a user research recruitment agency?

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.

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Recruiting Resources

Learn more about participant recruitment in qualitative research