Recruiting Participants for JTBD-based research

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In this article, I share guidelines, tips and resources to help you recruit, select and schedule participants for your JTBD-based research study.

Collecting data that help answer your research questions is at the very heart of any good research effort. Getting bad data can be worse than getting no data. Therefore, you need to ensure that you have the right sources to get those data; otherwise, the value of your research is limited.

Determining your research sample

You should plan roughly 2 weeks for finding, selecting, and scheduling research participants.

The recruitment starts with creating a research participant profile. This depends on the objective of your research study. For growth-related studies (increase adoption or reduce churn), we recommend speaking with consumers who:

• Bought and experienced the product recently (in the last 3 months)
• Were the decision-maker or part of the group who made the decision to buy

A good number to aim for in your JTBD-based research project is 15–20 interviews with consumers who fit the customer profile. You may need to do more interviews (~25 ) if you are working with a complex domain, e.g. B2B software adoption.

Buyers vs. Considerers

For B2B products, we recommend speaking with consumers who fit the above criteria. Avoid speaking with consumers who only intended to buy as much as possible because we want to study what people do, not what they say they will do. If the research sample gets small, then we can start interviewing buyers of products that were also tried, bought or considered buying.

Do not speak to people who have received the product for free, as a gift or part of a promotion, for example. They will not have made the trade-offs and comparisons that you will want to hear about. If your product is free by default, attempt to speak to people who have started using the product considerably more (more advanced features, more regular engagement) to talk about what goals motivated them to do so.

If you don’t have customers yet, or your customer base is still small

Just because your product is not yet launched, or you have no or only a handful of customers today, doesn’t mean you cannot do market research. Most likely, there are solutions available in the market today that your product is competing with (whether you know it or not). These need not be in the same product category or even industry.

For your recruiting, think about who and what your product is closest to today and start from there. Remember, your focus of research should not be your product or how it functions, but the progress it helps consumers make.

Compensation

Research participants should be compensated for their time they are spending with you. In our projects, we have had positive experience with giving participants of studies about both consumer and business products a monetary reward in form of an e-gift voucher. However, other forms of compensation, e.g. a discount on their SaaS subscription for a month, can also be compelling.

The value of the participant compensation depends on the type of participant you are looking to recruit and your budget. For studies about consumer products, we usually compensate participants with $50–75 (or currency equivalent) for a 45–60 minute one-on-one interview. Studies with professionals are usually around $100 (or currency equivalent) for a 45–60 minute one-on-one interview. The amount can go up to $200 if you are wanting to recruit company Executives.

Finding research participants

There are several methods to recruit participants for your research study. These include:

• Online questionnaires
• Phone calls or other forms of direct outreach, e.g. through LinkedIn
• Recruiting at in-person or online events, e.g. at meetups or conferences

For us, the most effective method has been online questionnaires. That is why I will focus on describing how to set up a questionnaire and recruit research participants in this chapter.

A recruitment questionnaire or “screener” is a set of questions that prospective participants need to answer in order to be considered for a research study. The questionnaire consists of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. We recommend including open-ended questions where the respondents are asked to write a short paragraph that can help better qualify the respondents. For example you could ask about what they do or don’t like about the product they purchased or the products they considered.

In our experience, shorter screeners have a higher completion rate. Therefore, we recommend using no more than seven questions that can be answered in five minutes or less. You can always (and should) ask respondents follow-up questions if you are unsure about their answers or suitability for your study. Alternatively, if you are really unsure, you could ask respondents to provide some proof of purchase etc. (a photo of a subscription or the actual invoice etc.). It’s better to spend time now, before your interviews start, than wasting your time during the interview on a participant who is making things up or has no story to tell.

What data to capture for recruitment

What data to capture in the screener depends on your research goals. Generally speaking, you should aim to collect the data that is related to their product purchase and experience.

Consumer products (B2C)

Introductory copy

• A “thank-you” for participating
• Why you are asking them to fill out the questionnaire
• The reward they will get
• What they can expect to happen after they submit their responses

About the product

1. When they bought [product] — multiple choice
2. Who they bought [product] for (e.g. for themselves, as a gift for someone else) — multiple choice
3. Who paid for [product] — multiple choice
4. Who was involved in the decision to buy [product] — multiple choice
5. In which situations they use [product] — open ended question to help verify they bought and consumed the product

About the respondent

1. Full name — short answer
2. Email address — short answer
3. Confirm availability for research study — state the dates, option of “yes” or “no”

For an example, see this eero Secure screener (pdf).

Business products (B2B)

Introductory copy

About the product

1. When they bought [product] — multiple choice
2. Who made the decision to buy [product] — multiple choice
3. Who paid for [product] — multiple choice
4. Who had control over the budget — multiple choice
5. What products they bought, used or considered that are similar to [product]— open ended question
6. In which situations they use [product] — open ended question to help verify they bought and consumed the product such as the one stated

About the respondent

1. Full name — short answer
2. Email address — short answer
3. Job role description or title — short answer
4. Confirm availability for research study — state the dates, option of “yes” or “no”

For an example, see this Miro for business screener (pdf).

Where to find participants

Recruiting the right research participants takes time and effort. Luckily, there are options available that suit a researcher’s budget and timelines.

Using recruitment marketplaces

There are plenty of market research companies and marketplaces who specialise in finding participants from the general population for research studies for a fee. We have found collaboration with them very cost and time effective.

Thanks to their participant management tools, setting up a recruitment campaign on one of these marketplaces often only takes minutes. You specify the basic criteria for your research, i.e. your target audience, their location, the compensation amount, and your interview schedule. You then create a screener using their online questionnaire. Once you have set your campaign live, they find suitable people in their pool of consumers and professionals.

If you are finding it difficult to recruit suitable candidates for your research, we suggest using multiple marketplaces at the same time — if your budget allows it. Pay attention to the scheduling interview slots across the different marketplaces to avoid double-bookings and disappointment — and extra costs.

Don’t despair if you don’t get responses right away. As more candidates find your recruitment campaign on these marketplaces, responses will come in. Be patient.

DIY recruitment

You can also recruit research participants yourself, of course. There are numerous free and paid tools available for creating your own screener. Most of these are easy to use and can handle some level of complexity, e.g. adding skip logic based on respondents’ answers. We often use Google Forms for our own recruiting.

After you have set up your recruitment screener, you can share a link to the screener on social media such as Twitter (using relevant hashtags), Facebook and LinkedIn (including LinkedIn Groups) or through emails or newsletters. If you are reaching out to people directly, make sure you have got their prior consent for receiving this type of communication.

Other ways to recruit research participants include email campaigns to your customer base, pop-ups or interstitials on your own website, creating specific landing pages or launching a paid, targeted ad campaign on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or industry-specific websites.

For an outreach email, I would recommend to include the following:

• Who you are — if you have been hired on behalf of your client to do the study
• Why you are contacting them, i.e the purpose of the study (usually “to learn” from them about how and why the adopted or abandoned a product)
• Dates the study will run
• Incentive amount, and how and when it will be paid
• CTA with link to screener

Ask your team members, Marketing colleagues or your client to help with spreading the word about your research and get people to fill out the questionnaire.

We suggest a coordinated, staged approach rather than everyone announcing the research at the same time. This exposes more people to your announcements. You may need to send a reminder if your first announcement did not bring in enough or unsatisfactory responses.

Tip 💡: Keep track of what recruitment channels worked best as this can shorten the search on your next research project.

Selecting participants

As questionnaire responses come in, you can start taking a look at them in your chosen tool. Most of the questionnaire tools have functionality that lets you sort, filter and even export respondents’ data for detailed review.

When reviewing screener responses, have your recruiting criteria to hand. How closely do respondents’ answers match your selection criteria?

Take your time reviewing individual responses to select your ideal fit. When using recruitment marketplaces, have a look at the respondent’s marketplace profile, including their LinkedIn or other social profiles if provided. You may also want to check any previous studies they participated in to see if they are suitable.

Shortlist respondents who you feel are suitable for your study and share the list with a member of the research team. It can help to get a view from another person if you are unsure about a respondent’s suitability. For client projects, you may want to share the shortlist of respondents with the client for their review. They may have a preference for respondents.

Determining whether a respondent is a “good fit” for your study or not based on a handful of questionnaire answers can be challenging. The point is not that you find the ideal participant. You should feel confident enough that the person can tell you their story, and that they will be able to articulate themselves well in a conversation.

Also bear in mind that people are busy and do not always pay full attention when responding to questionnaires. Expect answers to open-ended questions to be brief, grammatically incorrect and perhaps difficult to comprehend. If in doubt, we encourage you to ask respondents for clarification or more details about their answers. This will help you increase the chance of scheduling an interview with someone who is suitable for your study.

No recruitment effort is bulletproof. Despite your best screening efforts, there is no guarantee that you will get “quality” participants only. This is part of the process and happens during most research activities. Chances are that some respondents may have been rather generous in their questionnaire answers or have outright lied. As you make progress with interviewing consumers, you will become able to ascertain quickly in the interview whether the participant is suitable or not, and you can then take the appropriate action and stop the interview if they aren’t.

As you go through the interview and ask your questions, you will be listening to whether participants can tell you a story from their life (behaviour) that justifies their preferences.

Scheduling participants

When you have agreement on your research participants, it’s time to schedule the interviews. Our interviews usually are 45–60mins long, followed by 30mins debrief with the team. Therefore, you should aim to schedule no more than three to four interviews per day maximum, without exhausting the research team.

Try and automate the communication with participants and the scheduling of interviews as much as possible. Again, there are free and paid tools available that help you with both. You can set up automated sequences for sending email batches and follow-ups, and you can let selected participants schedule interview slots themselves which helps avoid unnecessary and time-consuming back and forth.

Back-up participants

People’s lives and schedules change, and spending time with a stranger, despite the monetary reward, can easily be de-prioritised. This is an unavoidable part of research. Expect not everyone who agrees to participate in your research study to be able to show up.

We recommend scheduling back-up participants for interviews at the end of your research period or for individual time slots. The back-up participant for an individual time slot waits to be called on if the scheduled participant doesn’t show up within 5 minutes of their allotted time. Back-up participants should be compensated for their waiting time in similar ways as the scheduled participants.

Recruitment marketplaces

There are a number of specialised marketplaces to help with the participant recruitment. The marketplaces listed below are not endorsements, simply some suggestions of services that we have used or considered using in the past.

Worldwide, including UK, Germany & France, Australia, South Africa

Respondent.io

They cover the largest customer base by markets as far as we know.

User Interviews

User Interviews are strong in North America. They recently expanded in Australia, France, Germany, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (as of July 2020).

Tip 💡: Use this link https://www.userinterviews.com/signup/ODIyNC0x to sign up to Userinterviews, and when you launch your first project, we will both get 3 free participants (a saving of $120-$240, excluding the participant incentive).

North America

Dscout

According to their website, their participant pool is about 100k strong, generally representative of the US smartphone owning population, with a bit of a presence in the UK + Canada, too.

Europe

TestingTime

Based in Switzerland, their core markets is Switzerland, but they also cover Germany, the UK, France and the Netherlands.

Tools for scheduling interviews

For scheduling interviews and back-ups, we have been using Calendly. It integrates well with our existing tools, i.e. Gmail and Google Calendar, and is fairly easy to use for both researchers and research participants.

Calendly offer a free and paid version.