When conducting user research, finding the right participants can make or break the success of your study. Identifying and engaging the right people to provide relevant insights is a challenging and time-consuming process, which is why many businesses may consider turning to self-serve platforms for a seemingly quick win at a lower cost.

Unfortunately, many soon realise the value a user recruitment agency offers cannot be matched by these types of platforms, which is when they come to us at People for Research: with a depleted lead time and budget. We love a challenge, but this can really impact the feasibility and overall success of your user research.

So, what exactly is it about self-serve platforms that keep clients coming back to us time and time again, having tried out a self-serve alternative?

✅ Participant quality

Assessing the quality of anything is not just black or white, or 0’s and 1’s; it’s about gut feel, something that we humans are really quite good at… At PFR, we have dedicated community managers who verify the quality of our participant community and can pick up on red flags that automated systems simply cannot. Self-serve platforms may have some automated verification processes, but most rely on you as the user to perform your own checks.

We’ve even had reports from several clients that the rise of online platforms like ChatGPT is having a huge impact on the credibility of their participants, with many using the AI-technology to answer screener questions to get selected via self-serve platforms.

Not only can AI-generated responses lead to participants that might not be suitable, particularly for more niche research projects where a specific knowledge or skill profile of participant may be required, but can also minimise the collection of insightful or constructive responses that could better inform the objective of your research. This is because the essence of AI-generated content is to reframe what has already been written, therefore removing any possibility of a fresh or honest perspective that might come with a genuine response.

In this way, the onus is on you as the researcher to go the extra mile and turn to alternative methods or platforms to help verify your responses. That’s where we come in.

Unlike specialist recruitment agencies, self-serve platforms generally don’t offer screener writing or multi-layer verification services, which can lead to incorrect or poor-quality participants to filter through to your research sessions. At PFR, we create bespoke screeners for every project, which are reviewed and signed off by our clients to ensure we have understood all criteria and are using language that will resonate with the target audience.

We also use a two-stage screening process:

 The first stage is an online questionnaire designed to understand initial suitability, without being leading. All responses are assessed and only those that pass through this stage will progress.

 The second stage is conducted over the phone and uses unbiased, non-leading questions to identify the participants suitability, verify their first stage screener answers and ensure they can hold a conversation. This helps us to refine the selection we put forward, so our clients can be confident they are receiving high quality, reliable and engaged participants every time.

🎯 Recruiting hard-to-reach participants

Participants may be considered to be hard-to-reach for a number of reasons, with digital exclusion being the number one request by clients. Digital exclusion can be for a variety of reasons:

Access – this can include assistive technology incompatibility or poor internet signal
Ability – a lack of technical skills (typically older demographics, but not always!)
 Affordability – unable to have an internet connection at home due to lack of funds or poor credit score

This poses some recruitment challenges, especially for self-serve platforms which are solely digital; you are reliant on their database to deliver the correct participants, and your pool is already skewed towards those who are more digitally-competent and accessible. This will limit your ability to secure hard-to-reach participants, such as those with accessibility needs or low digital literacy, as well as business professionals who are “cash-rich, time-poor”.

At PFR, we build bespoke recruitment plans for each project, using internal and external recruitment methods to identify and secure the best people for your research. This includes but is not limited to: our internal consumer and B2B databases, referral campaigns, targeted advertising, LinkedIn recruiter, partnerships and free find. Depending on the audience type, we will prioritise online or offline methods. By being proactive and using multiple recruitment methods, it means PFR can continuously deliver hard-to-reach participants for their client.

🏆 Recruitment expertise

Most self-serve platforms provide a one-dimensional service, with sourcing participants as the sole focus. With our 25 years of experience, we understand there is a lot more to consider to ensure valuable insights are obtained.

Alongside recruitment, we can advise on criteria feasibility, propose market-rate incentives to maintain engagement, recommend research formats and share insights/risks associated with your target audience and how we can mitigate these for your research. We can also provide consent form management, collect pre or post research tasks, book third party venues, process incentives and conduct tech tests ahead of the session.

We regularly reflect on our delivery and adapt our processes to ensure we are providing clients with a quality service. This has resulted in PFR being awarded ‘Best Support Service’ by the Market Research Society (MRS) in 2019 and nominations in 2021 and 2022.

Our experience allows us to provide a comprehensive recruitment service, so our clients can focus on what they do best: running research!

🫶 Participant engagement

Establishing and maintaining a relationship with participants is a crucial step to keeping them engaged in suitable research studies. At PFR, we have regular touch-points with participants to build an engaged community, from our onboarding experience right through to recruitment. This results in loyal and motivated participants, ready to take part in research sessions and support our clients.

With self-serve platforms, participant communication and support is undertaken by the researcher, which is a time-consuming but very important process. If not completed correctly, it can often lead to incomplete or low quality responses. With it being self-serve for businesses to use as they wish, participants can experience an inconsistent level of service and communication.

At PFR we provide clear confirmations, tried and tested participant communication to boost engagement/reduce drop outs, and a direct line for participants to reach the project lead/customer support team with any questions or concerns they have ahead of the session.These activities enable us to build trust and strong relationships with our participant community, which ultimately benefits our client’s research.

📅 Past participation

Understanding participants’ past participation is essential to making an informed decision on potential experience that may cause bias. Many self-serve platforms only provide the number of projects a participant has taken part in; this limited information doesn’t allow you to make an informed decision which could skew results and lead to misleading conclusions.

At PFR we are transparent throughout, providing our clients with participants past participation in the form of date completed, topic and research format. During our second stage screening, we ensure participants haven’t taken part in similar research and we verify they are not scheduled to take part in any research in the future. We do this to ensure we are eliminating serial participants and to reduce bias.

By recruiting using external recruitment methods and running frequent sign-up campaigns, a high percentage of our participants have never taken part in research. This offers our clients a fresh perspective and provides a better understanding of your user journey.

⚙️ Flexibility and customisation

Self-serve platforms all have their limitations, with only a set number of features available and boxes to tick! You may find your user research study needs to be adapted or simplified to work with their limitation, which can lead to simplified or reduced results. By working with a ridged self-serve research platform, you miss out on the flexibility that working with an experienced agency can offer.

PFR understand the importance of working in partnership with our clients. We take time at the beginning to understand the research objectives; from here, we can offer a range of flexible solutions to generate relevant insight and lead to more accurate results.

We also tailor our recruitment plan to yield the best results every time. This includes content, recruitment strategy, submission time to market and more.

🤔 Still considering a self-serve platform?

Self-serve platforms may seem like an easy and convenient way to source participants, but it can diminish the overall quality and success of your research study. Using People for Research can help mitigate these risks and provide a higher level of quality control, engagement, flexibility and expertise to ensure a successful outcome, every time.

Nicole Partington, Client Services Manager

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user testing or market research get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.