In the ever-changing world of market research, it's necessary to stay up to date with common qualitative recruitment practices to ensure you receive actionable, reliable data.
Traditional recruitment efforts, while once trusted resources, may now include biases and various inefficiencies, limiting diversity and reach.
Recruiting for participants is always changing, but our qualitative recruitment company stays up to date on current trends and challenges in the industry, and has the expertise to recruit your target audience.
This blog post will review multiple outdated recruitment approaches, so take note when considering these for your next study!
Outdated Method #1: Flyers
As our society evolves, methods of reaching them do too. The days of collecting feedback via pen, paper, and landline telephone are largely over.
Over a decade ago when I started in market research, you could recruit a full study by going around to a handful of stores, laundromats, or churches and placing flyers.
We’d spend a few hours putting up flyers, and by the time we got back to the office, the phone was ringing. What a time!
Today, you’d be extremely lucky to have even one person reach out from this method; not to mention actually qualify for the study.
Drawbacks to flyers as a qualitative recruiting method
With flyers, you’re limited to the audience that may be frequenting a laundromat or that store and their primary demographic. For example, if you are searching for homeowners, a laundromat isn’t the best place to reach them.
What’s more, flyers limit options for precise targeting. Since they’re being handed out in public, targeting a specific demographic is quite hard in this setting.
The audience you end up reaching may be completely opposite from the research you want to conduct. As a result, this leads to irrelevant responses, and wasted time on both sides.
Outdated Method #2: Referrals/Word-of-Mouth
When relying on referrals for participant recruitment, several factors come into play:
- Poor Participant Engagement
With a referral, you are not only relying on your participant to be interested, engaged, and to follow through with the research, but you’re also relying on them to advocate and communicate about the research on your behalf. - Data Integrity Concerns
There are significant concerns regarding data quality with referrals. For instance, those referring someone to the study are only incentivized if that person qualifies and participates in the research. Because of this, there is no true way to know if they have given them insider information on the study. For this reason, extra precaution should be taken when screening/re-screening anyone who was referred to the study.
While referrals never hurt to try, especially on a particularly challenging recruit, it is not feasible to rely on this as a recruitment method for the full study.
If you are using referrals to recruit, it is recommended to offer a small reward.
The reward should only be provided for each person that is not only referred, but also:
- Meets the qualification criteria
- Answers the re-screening call, and is scheduled for the research
- Attends the research, and completes it within expectations
Outdated Method #3: Intercepts
Intercepting used to be a highly preferred method for recruiting participants for market research.
Once upon a time, a good recruiter could recruit hundreds of participants within a few hours standing in a mall.
Of course, these were the days when it was normal to walk around the mall to browse stores, or just hang out.
However, a few things have impacted the ability to intercept:
- Rise of online shopping, leading to the decline of foot traffic in areas like malls, shopping centers, etc.
- Use of cell phones and other devices such as headphones, making it harder to get people’s attention and engage with them face-to-face.
Adding onto this, mall demographics have largely shifted. This includes much less of a mix, and it has become much more challenging to recruit participants outside of the location’s typical geographic.
Recommended Reading: 5 Reasons Why You Should Ditch Mall Market Research
Outdated Method #4: Cold-Calling
Remember when people used to call each other?
Before the emergence of smartphones, it was considered easy to reach someone on their landline and recruit them for a study.
Not only were people more likely to answer calls from numbers they didn’t know, but there seemed to be less weariness of scams or annoyance with any sort of solicitation.
Now, with the rise of scams and soliciting calls, and less willingness to answer calls from unknown numbers (or in general), cold calling recruitment has become highly unreliable for recruitment.
Aside from the high rejection rates, limited reach, and negative perception, cold-calling is also costly and time-consuming for the recruiter/s. Since cold-calling requires a certain amount of training and dedicated time, this could be spent on other, more modern recruitment methods.
Contact Our Qualitative Recruitment Firm
When our clients reach out to us with project requests, our team does the research into the target audience, and has multiple plans in place on how to reach and recruit them for the market research project.
We’ll let you know what will (and will not) work to reach your participants, but our work doesn’t stop there. We’ll conduct the necessary follow-ups to ensure high-quality participants are not only recruited, but follow through with the study.
Want to learn more? Use the information below to contact us for your next qualitative recruit.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Ashley Reynolds
With nearly 10 years of experience in market research, Ashley has worked on countless quantitative and qualitative research studies. As a Fieldwork Manager at Drive Research, she’s involved in every stage of the project, especially recruitment.
Learn more about Ashley, here.
