Self-Serve vs. Third-Party Recruitment: Considerations for Each Approach

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When we ask colleagues about their biggest research challenge, they invariably respond with “recruiting.” Finding and scheduling participants is a necessary burden in conducting human-centered research but we have yet to meet someone who absolutely loves the task. The amount of logistics, considerations, nuances, exceptions and follow-ups can create a headache — even for the most willing and seasoned ResearchOps professional.

Today, services that allow for self-service recruiting have helped teams quickly get the job done. However, the traditional third-party recruiter route is still popular and necessary. Beyond developing an air-tight screener and picking the right incentive, here are our considerations for selecting a recruiting partner/service.

Third-Party Recruiting

Schlesinger and Fieldwork are familiar powerhouses in recruiting and facility rentals. Their all-in-one service from recruiting to hosting data collection is seductively streamlined. They have broad and international reach, they provide beautiful scheduling grids, and magically reschedule no-shows. Local agencies, like our Cambridge Focus and Focus On Boston, have the same skills and feel personal. Working with them is like a warm hug of comfort, saying “we’ll find your people for you.”

Make no mistake, we favor working with third-party recruiters. We believe in outsourcing work that needs expertise to experts. And while we are professionals in research, we are not authorities in recruiting. So what are some of the benefits of working with a third-party recruiter? Having a person to talk to certainly helps (but we also adore the project service providers of UserInterviews). Here is our list of pros and cons.

Pros of Third-Party Recruiting

• Third-party recruiters know what it’s like to be in the field and anticipate and take care of complicated logistics. In February 2020, right before COVID19 compelled a lock-down, we were in the field in Toronto, Chicago, London, Madrid and Zurich in the span of 1.5 weeks. We were conducting full-day observations and interviews with various stakeholders in workplace environments. We partnered with a third-party recruiter to manage scheduling and participant communication. Our recruiter relayed site visit expectations, ensuring all participants were primed and knew their interview time slot. Small details like which door to enter, getting access to bathrooms while on site, etc. were all managed by the recruiter. Because we are a micro-agency, we don’t have ResearchOps resources— and many of our clients don’t either. So a recruiter really takes on these tasks so we can focus on the work.
• Third-party recruiters are the best collaborators for screener edits. I have learned everything I know about screener development by working with third-party recruiters. They provide meaningful suggestions, alternatives, and indications of where a screener may be too excluding. Third-party recruiters are the ones who taught me to leverage an open-ended question to gauge participant articulateness (ability to share). While this is pretty standard practice for us, I remember the first time a recruiter indicated its function and purpose.

Cons of Third-Party Recruiting

• Third-party recruiters tend to request longer lead times. The fact that recruiters use a combination of means to reach, identify, and secure participants means that they may request at least two weeks of lead time. For more specialized recruits they may request even more time. Two weeks is pretty much the standard and for some this may seem like a long time, especially when compared to self-service options (where a schedule can be filled in 1 day).
• Third-party recruiting costs can cause sticker shock. There is no way to prove to a client or stakeholder that despite the high amount on the quote, that using a recruiter will always be a more efficient and economical choice. If you ever want to prove that it is, keep track of the hours you put into managing the self-service solution, coupled with the cost of leveraging the solution. But still, this sticker shock is hard to prove as the better path.

Some Tips

• Only work with recruiters that ask questions. If you send a request to a recruiter and their response is a quote — without any clarifying questions or discussion — this is a red flag. We have seen varying quality in third-party recruiters. The best recruiters will have a conversation with you about the effort, not just take the work.
• If a recruiter makes a recommendation, take their advice and get it in writing. One of the biggest risk in any study’s success is recruitment. By taking your third-party recruiter’s advice (such as increasing an incentive, changing the wording of a screen question, etc.) you are not only taking expert advice, you are also transferring any liability to them.

Self-Service Recruiting

UserInterviews.com, Respondent.io, and Ethn.io are all self-serve recruiting services. They offer pay-as-you-go or subscription plans to leverage their automated communication features, participant databases, and customer service. These solutions offer many of the same basic features, but may specialize in certain areas. Ethn.io, for example, specializes in embedding screener surveys in your digital properties to recruit your own users.

One of these days, we’ll write up a review of our experience leveraging each of these services (even if it didn’t lead to successful execution into a study). We really love working with self-service solutions because they are fast and remove a lot of the non-intellectual work of recruiting (like reminding people to show up, or converting time zones). Here is our list of pros and cons.

Pros of Self-Serve Recruiting

• There is very little sticker shock with self-serve recruiting. Oh how sweet it is to have an itemized bill that looks like you are just paying for incentives! Many third-party recruiters will charge roughly the incentive amount to recruit, whereas self-serve solutions will charge 50%. Or, if you are leveraging your own users lists, just a nominal charge fee for disseminating incentives. When functioning properly, and most beneficially for internal teams, the overall cost of recruitment does go down.
• Self-serve recruiting gives you access to databases of participants. Many self-serve solutions are getting more robust, not only offering general consumer details, but also creating verified databases of professionals. They are doing things like verifying these participants with LinkedIn. These services also give you a sense of how responsive and committed a participant was in the past. There is also visibility into that participants study history. All of this information are details researchers are interested in knowing, but don’t necessarily ask about in a screener.

Cons of Self-Serve Recruiting

• Self-serve recruiting participant databases reach a willing and able audience. While they may claim otherwise, I have found that the most responsive participants on these services skews younger and in urban areas. As such, you may be hitting a blind spot of non-technically savvy participants.
• Self-serve solutions requires your effort, especially up front. If you are an in-house research, you will likely benefit more from self-serve solutions. You’ll likely use similar language, have a single informed consent, and have the same research team members across studies. However, if you work in an agency, you are creating these materials from the ground up with each client— often in a super tight timeframe. As an agency researcher, your time will never be cheaper than hiring a skilled third-party recruiter, so you will either need to call out the additional effort you put in to recruiting, or eat the cost.

Some Tips

• Vet various self-serve solutions and know them really well. Ethn.io is known for embedding into your digital properties, however it falls short on customer service and demonstrating value at their various subscription tiers. UserInterviews.com automates follow-up communications and reminders, but isn’t as flexible in terms of customizing these messages. Take advantage of free demos, talk to people that work at these companies. Find out where the shortcomings are. If you have any recommendations or wish-fors, reach out to them. Many of these recruiting services were started by researchers, and they’ve thought of a lot, but they may have overlooked specific cases that could be really meaningful to you.
• Calculate the actual cost difference between self-serve and third-party. If you’re in-house, as we mentioned, you will likely gain by going self-serve in the long run. If you are freelance or work within an agency, you might not. Get a good understanding of how much time you spend programming the tool, procuring lists, making edits to communications, following up with non-responsive participants, collecting any pre-session requirements (NDAs, Informed Consent, homework, etc.) You may find that in the end, hiring a third-party recruiter is the most efficient and economical choice.

No matter what approach you choose, just remember that we have still not met a researcher who enjoys recruiting.

If you are that person, reach out to us. Tell us why you love it! In the meantime, this will be our charge to third-party and self-serve recruiters alike: if you can make recruiting — an anxiety-inducing, high-risk process — into a delightful experience for researchers…we will love you forever!