Practical Tips for Live Recruiting
The happiest part of my user research experience has been to hand-off the recruiting tasks to a qualified agency and focus on the strategy and execution of the study itself. So when I was asked to conduct a qualitative user research study, I didn’t worry too much until the key stakeholder laid down some ground rules for recruiting participants. They were:
- Participants must be prospects and not existing customers
- Participants must reflect a global audience from all over the world
- There is no budget to fund travel expenses
Enter live recruiting and remote research. I am no recruiting expert nor do I challenge the value of recruiting agencies, but using live recruiting was the best way for us to work within these constraints. Here are some things I learned sailing the choppy recruiting waters.
Live recruiting enables you to intercept customers on your website through a pop-up form, collect some information to qualify them and recruit participants for your study.
Scheduling vs. Conducting in Real Time
Typically, a person recruited “live” is asked to participate in a study immediately. For my project, I instead scheduled qualified participants for an in-depth study at a later date, because:
- I was a team of one recruiting for the research and being on after business hours was not ideal
- We were recruiting around Christmas time and I had to be sensitive to participant’s availability
- The scheduling helped me assess the quality of my participants
- Being a global audience I was able to schedule participants at a time that was convenient to both sides
The downside of this approach were:
- I wasn’t observing participants conducting a task real-time. There was some pretense involved.
- There were last minute cancellations and I had to find alternative participants to fit that demographic.
As an aside, Nate Bolt’s book on remote research is in-depth and a must-read for all those considering remote research and live recruiting. Reading this article is not enough.
Tools You’ll Need
For a successful recruiting project, you need:
- Recruiting software, like Ethnio.com: Look for a tool that makes it easy to embed an intercept form on the web site. Be sure to talk to the company to learn more about available support.
- Spreadsheet for tracking participants: The one below worked for me, which I used not only to record the basics (who they are), but also when I contacted them and the time difference.
- A system for categorizing and tagging email: The labels in Gmail helped me maintain and track correspondence with the respondents.
Recruiting a Global Audience
Incorporating people from around the world can have its own set of challenges. While many people from outside the US visited the site, we had to contend with other challenges:
- If you are recruiting from Africa or South East Asia, there is often no broadband and there are power cuts to deal with
- English is often not a first language and so you need to write in simple language.
- Internet connections can be slow at the participants’ end and you should plan on adding an additional 30 minutes to your session time
- Finding participants from specific areas of the world took longer. For recruiting 6-8 participants we had to screen almost 60 participants.
- Time differences may force you to reject candidates who would otherwise be excellent participants. I had one participant from Ethiopia who met all my criteria but could only meet at 2am ET.
- There are legalities to recruiting a global audience. Check Nate Bolt’s book for advice.
Challenges
A global audience wasn’t the only thing that presented challenges:
- Technical Issues: The client’s content management system was extremely complex and the team was apprehensive about putting up a “random” javascript code.
- Recruiting & Timing: Follow-ups were a nightmare given that I was balancing recruiting with my other project commitments and planning the study. Additionally, since live recruiting is time-based, once we found our 8 participants, we could not use the remaining for a new study.
- Incentives: Amazon is not available in all countries. One participant asked to donate the money to his favorite charity.
Benefits
Despite the challenges, live recruiting was the best way for us to go. It was:
- Direct: Having a one-on-one was most effective such that we used a good number of participants for a new study.
- Convenient: Live recruiting helped me manage my own schedule given that I was scheduling the sessions
- Cheap & Easy: We incentivized our participants with Amazon’s online gift certificates.
- Fast: The turnaround in receiving responses (despite its being Christmas) was quick.
When you do it yourself…
Some advice for when you set up your own live recruiting program:
- Get help: If possible ask a colleague to help schedule participants. Collaborate to screen and narrow down the final list but have one person focus completely on recruiting and scheduling.
- Re-use the screener: Live recruiting is not a solution for every research study. Leverage the code you have for the screener for iterative research cycles.
- Don’t forget consents and releases: Be sure to obtain legal consent and know that laws govern everything. Nate Bolt has an entire chapter dedicated to this.
- Look for global incentives: Amazon is a global phenomenon but sadly not available in all countries.Consider offering up charity donations as an alternative or inviting participants to use the amazon gift card to download music from the US site.
Good comments! I just recently attended a webinar by Bolt|Peters on this. I am currently in the process of doing a proof of concept before presenting why and how remote usability would be advantageous for the department I am in.