ARTICLE
Five Ways to Find Professional Staff for Research
Let’s say you’re looking to do user research — like interviews, user testing, or card sorts — with a target audience of business or nonprofit professionals. It can be tricky to reach these folks in order to recruit them, and it gets more difficult the more specific and senior staff you're looking for.
But having done a few of these projects recently, I can suggest five different ways that might work for you.
My key advice is to start with the people you know. If you can send out a request to your own email list, that’s ideal.
Friends and family or email discussion lists are also good possibilities, but it will be harder to get more than a dozen or so people this way.
1.Reach out to your own list
In most cases, by far the best way to find potential test participants in your target audience is to reach out to the people who have already signed up to hear from you. Email (the more targeted the better) is much more effective than social media for a specific ask like this, but you might be able to recruit a few people off your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.This isn't the best method if you need to conduct research with people unfamiliar with your organization, but typically only a small percentage will be very familiar with any given aspect of what you do.
2. Look for family and friends of your organization
If you only need a handful of people-- like for a user test-- it can be useful to ask your coworkers to identify who they know who fits into your target audience, and reach out to them. Think through, however, if you’ll need to supplement that group with additional people to make sure your participants aren’t biased towards the demographics of your staff. For instance, are all the people you’re reaching out to young professionals? Progressive? Tech savvy? If so, is that true of your target audience?
3. Post to discussion lists or online groups
If you’re well known on a particular email discussion list or online groups frequented by your desired audience, you may be able to find participants by posting to those communities. Give them a bit of background and an easy way to take action, like a link to the test or a form to qualify (along with a monetary incentive!)
4. LinkedIn Ads
If you need more people (for instance, for a card sort test) and your own list won’t work, advertisements on LinkedIn can allow you to reach specific types of professionals quite effectively. If you’ve never advertised there, it may take you a bit of time to figure out the interface and set up your ads. The price depends on how many people there are on LinkedIn that meet your criteria, but tends to be in the realm of $5-$10 per person who clicks through (to your test, for instance).
5. Pay for an online recruiting service
A number of services, both part of online testing platforms and standalone ones, offer to recruit professionals, even high-level ones like CEOs, for a fee. However, these services rely on participants to provide information about their own expertise, and in my experience, many greatly exaggerate their qualifications. In an experiment with a reputable service, we aimed to recruit professionals in finance, supply chain, or sustainability from large corporations. We initially gathered about 300 individuals who claimed they met the criteria. However, only four out of the 300 remained after scrutinizing the data and dropping people who were suspiciously inconsistent in answering about their own purported area of expertise. I suspect that these participants were tech-savvy folks in junior positions in these industries— if they worked in them at all — looking to gain extra income through online surveys.
I now consider these participants to be similar to Mechanical Turk users (a fairly common way to recruit less specific audiences)… but likely more costly. If you decide to use online recruiting services, it's crucial to pose screening questions that would be simple for a qualified participant but difficult for someone unrelated to the field. For instance, a knowledge-based question like "Which of the following is a key job function of a supply chain professional?" with carefully crafted answer choices. This won't eliminate all unqualified participants, but it will help narrow down the pool.
In summary
My key advice is to start with the people you know. If you can send out a request to your own email list, that’s ideal. Friends and family or online/ email discussion lists are also good possibilities, but it will be harder to get more than a dozen or so people this way.
If you need to move beyond people you know, LinkedIn ads are effective, although they’ll require a bit of investment in both time and money to get started with. It may be tempting to turn to online recruiting services, which appear to be easier and cheaper to deal with, but for many specific audiences, they may have a hard time delivering people who actually fill your criteria (as opposed to those who are just willing to claim they do).