Better participants. Richer insights.

There are various ways to recruit participants for research. Firstly, you need to define the audience to target (and their associated demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and professional traits), then you need to find and screen those participants either from within your customer base or through external recruitment.

User Interviews is a tool that’s purpose-built to help with recruiting participants for any kind of research. We provide fast access to quality participants for user research, market research, or AI training.

Other methods for research recruitment include posting Craigslist ads, sharing links to study applications on social media, recruiting user research participants by email, or contracting a user experience recruitment agency. However, these methods tend to be more time-consuming and less reliable than a tried-and-tested platform like User Interviews.

Learn more about the best ways to recruit participants for a study in our step-by-step guide to participant recruitment.

The right number of participants will depend on the type of research you’re doing and the specific methods you plan to use. Guidelines for user testing recruitment may differ from user interview recruitment. For quantitative research, the rule of thumb is to recruit however many people you need to achieve the level of statistical significance your study requires. 

But what about qualitative studies? You need to take into account the scope and goals of your research, how homogenous your participants are, which qualitative method you’re planning to use, your expected no-show rate, and other factors. It can get pretty complicated! Luckily, we’ve built a simple qualitative sample size calculator to help you determine the right number for your study.

Today, we have 6 million participants in our database, representing a diverse group of people. We are confident that we can recruit for most studies, even the niche ones!

The best way to check the feasibility of your recruit is to use our live feasibility calculator. Simply select your audience type, adjust the targeting criteria, and get an instant estimate of the number applications you’re likely to get. No sign in required and it only takes a minute.

If you’re looking for a more general overview of User Interviews’ participants, download our Research Panel Report for key participant stats, data on our most-requested segments, and more information about how we source and vet high-quality participants.

We do the work of building a high-quality, trustworthy panel so researchers always have a fresh pool of candidates for their studies. Our panel is 100% proprietary. We never buy audiences or source participants from third party panels. Our monthly panel growth rate is around 5%.

Word-of-mouth and social channels make up 79% of our panel acquisition. This category includes social media, influencer networks, and referrals from existing participants and researchers.

Alongside our broad recruitment efforts, we actively invest in smaller and niche markets through sponsorships, social outreach, targeted advertising, influencer campaigns, and industry-specific blogs and publications. We prioritize recruitment of niche markets based on researcher demand—meaning, if you need them, we’ll try to find them.

Learn more about User Interviews’ participants by downloading our Research Panel Report.

At User Interviews, we use fraud detection algorithms, session feedback, profile verification, staff training, and other strategies to thwart misrepresentation and inappropriate activity on our platform. These measures work—our fraud reporting rate is very low at 0.6% of overall sessions, and researcher feedback on our participants is 98% positive.

We have invested in building a multi-layer defense system to combat fraud before in impacts your research:

• Level 1: Participant-level fraud detection that begins at signup and continues throughout the participant lifecycle, powered by multiple ML models and third-party data enrichment
• Level 2: Project-level protections that proactively identify and safeguard studies most vulnerable to fraud while balancing fulfillment speed
• Level 3: Researcher-facing tools and guidance designed to help you set up studies and screeners with confidence to ensure only qualified participants make it through
• Level 4: Operations team oversight & support on every Recruit project, with project coordinators trained to spot and respond quickly to fraud

We intentionally don’t share all the specifics about our methods for identifying and preventing fraud, since making this information available can help bad actors to thwart the system. But rest assured, fraud is a rare occurrence on our platform. And of course, with our quality guarantee you’ll never pay for a fraudulent session.

Learn more about how we deter fraudulent participants and maintain the highest quality panel.

Using user research recruitment agencies can be a viable solution for your user research needs, but it’s not the only option. 

Some situations when you might turn to a user recruitment agency include: when you’re conducting research in unfamiliar, international markets and you need an agency with specialized knowledge of that region to handle nuances of language and culture; or, when you’re running a very niche study that requires hyper-manual legwork to pinpoint a very small population with a low incidence rate; or, if you have the budget and you just want a team of recruiters on call who will find participants, build screeners, weed out bad fits, and deliver participants for your study.

But recruiting agencies are often not the best option. If you want to get started quickly, work within a limited budget, or have more control over participant selection, working with an agency may not be viable. You may prefer to try a recruitment platform like User Interviews that can provide fast, high-quality, targeted recruitment at an affordable and transparent price.