Field recruitment
Field recruitment is the process of finding, screening and scheduling participants who match a study's criteria, whether through recruitment agencies, customer lists, panels, intercepts or referrals. The term comes from fieldwork, the data-collection phase of a study.
How it works
Recruitment starts from a participant profile: the behaviors, characteristics and quotas the study needs. A screener questionnaire filters candidates, ideally asking about behavior in a neutral way so people cannot guess the right answers. Qualified candidates are scheduled, confirmed and reminded, with backup participants booked in case of no-shows.
Common problems include professional respondents who join many studies, people who misrepresent themselves to qualify, and samples that lean toward the easiest-to-reach. Clear screeners, identity and fraud checks, and limits on how often one person can take part reduce them. Screening for recent behavior, rather than self-description, keeps the sample close to the profile.
A worked example
Applications for a payroll provider's study of HR managers who changed payroll supplier in the last year reach 400, half of them from firms with over 250 employees. The screener has 9 questions; 38 applicants qualify, and fraud checks remove 6 of those. The final 20 fill both quotas, with 4 backups on call.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
Sourcing, screening and fraud checks, the jobs a field recruiter handles, are part of a Pulse study, with participants drawn from a customer list or recruited to the brief's profile.