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How we became strategic about recruiting for user research

Recruiting for user research is hard — get over it.

Disclaimer: this is not a how-to article about recruiting. This article is about creating better recruiting strategies and being intentional about the recruiting techniques you might want to use.

We often run into multiple roadblocks when trying to find participants that will provide us with useful and meaningful feedback:

• There are often few people who actually match your target audience
• It takes time (to find the people that match the right profiles, to find a way to contact them, to wait for their answer, to manage different agendas, to deal with last minute changes…) and you often don’t have that time
• You don’t always have the (right) contact information
• People do not respond (even more if you are not being a bit impersonal, because you are trying to save time)
• People do not have the time (because they have their own life, their work…)
• People do not show up (and they won’t warn you beforehand)
• You don’t want to talk to the same people all the time (because it introduces bias into your research)
• Your team is often not aware of how complicated recruitment can be (don’t hesitate to be loud about it)

Most likely you won’t have a ResearchOps team that will do it for you — well, at least we don’t!

So what can we do about it?

Recently, I looked back at the more than 20 different recruiting techniques used here at Algolia. I decided to document how we proceeded and to classify these techniques so it would be easier to:

• Identify the right ones to use in the future (and be mindful about our recruiting strategies)
• Be more efficient in recruiting
• Easily onboard anyone who might need to do some user recruiting in the company: designers, PMs, new user research team members 😉

For each technique, we asked: What is the technique best used for? What could be improved? Is it working? How long does it take? How might we improve it? Here is the template:

With a real example:

Here is how to use such a library of techniques in the future

1. Always start by defining the users you are trying to talk to

This may change a lot given the part of the product you are testing and what you want to learn. This is best done in two parts:

• Identify your ideal testers 🌈(with selection criteria to create a panel)
• Identify who are the easiest people to contact/reach

It’s important to start with the blue-sky version. Then, given your time constraints, your budget & the energy you can put into recruiting, you can establish a level of confidence in your recruiting (that’s what lead us to test and implement the Testing Corner at Algolia, the organization of internal usability test every other week — an article to come soon on the topic!).

If you are in a B2B company, options may be more limited. If you have a very niche B2C product reaching out to non-clients can be a better option.

Keep your personae /user profiles (or whatever user-defining characteristics you are using) in mind, and choose who you are going to test with accordingly.

2. Identify the channels that can lead you to your targeted users

We came up with a list, you might have more or very different ones.

Here are the 10 channels we have identified so far.

• CSMs (customer facing teams) ❤️
• Direct emailing
• Via support (thanks to our support team, via support ticket…)
• Social media
• Recruiting tools (in house, paid or partners)
• Agencies ($)
• User- specific communities
• Hosted events (your own, or at other companies)
• Through the product (ex. pop up in your app or a live chat)
• Thanks to Algolians participation and their personal network

3. Per selected channel, identify the most likely to succeed techniques

For each channel, we have different techniques that may lead to different results or might be more appropriate given the users we want to recruit.

For example, if I want to recruit end-users (in our case, people who actually search for something) to set up a comparative analysis of search patterns across different cultures, I might use ads on social media, because I know how efficient it is to recruit “B2C” users given their localization.

On the other hand, if I want to test a very specific flow in our Shopify plug-in, I might use Shopify communities or our internal Shopify Slack channel.

☝️Note: don’t forget to update your library of techniques regularly (add new techniques, update existing techniques status…)

Last little piece of advice before you leave your computer to head back to real life.

⏳ Start recruiting from day 0 (as soon as you know you have a study coming)

🤹‍♀️ Use several techniques at once (now that you are prepared!) to maximize potential leads

🔔 Use reminders to think about getting back to people who do not answer, to send invitations, to send your test participants reminders, etc. … (especially if you are using several recruiting techniques)

👯‍♂️ Recruit more than needed (because people won’t respond, because people who responded won’t show up… I am putting together another article on how to make your recruiting techniques more fruitful — coming soon)

📝 Keep track of what you do, so you (or your teammates) don’t call the same user twice

This is it! Please share what techniques worked for you!

Thanks to Marlin De May & Alexandra Prokhorova for their help on this article.