Vidlet Blog Your Recruiting Methods are Outdated

If you've ever worked in the research industry, you know the frustration of having bad respondents. With quantitative research, it's hard to tell who is truthful and who is not in the mix of all the survey answers. With qualitative research, however, a bad recruit is impossible to ignore. Despite carefully crafting screener answers and weeding out the ones who don't qualify, there is bound to be a mix that slips through the cracks. Recruiters for qualitative research are up against an industry that is churning out fast quant insights and bombarding consumers with easy cash earning options. Qualitative research requires engaged, thoughtful, and articulate respondents which conflicts with frequent survey takers who will often lie to be included in a study or create multiple aliases to participate in a study several times. So how do qualitative research recruiters sift through the mix of these professional survey takers? There are a few ways to further screen respondents, however, many of them are time-consuming and lack the results you're seeking. Phone screening is one way to add a barrier to a professional survey taker although calling each individual respondent will take up most of your recruiting time and is not a guarantee in weeding out those unqualified respondents. This is where Vidlet comes in. Incorporating our mobile app, video management platform, and leveraging our Customer Success team in the recruiting process, we've figured out two key methods that help us find the respondents we're looking for and keep them engaged. We use video for our research so why not use it in our recruiting? Traditional screeners can only show you so much and since our respondents will be answering research questions with selfie videos, we need to know they're the right fit. By pairing a video screener with our written one, we are able to clearly see who qualifies and who doesn't without wasting our time calling respondents or worse, finding out after the fact that they weren't the right fit. Body language says a lot and asking 1-2 questions pertaining to the study gives a good look into who may be lying and who is genuine. This also creates a barrier for those who have created multiple aliases, allowing us to see their faces guarantees we won't include the same person several times. Now that we've chosen our qualified respondents, how do we keep them engaged? While Vidlet allows you to quickly follow-up with respondents with more questions, engagement can easily drop off. We live in an instant gratification and information-heavy world, grabbing and holding onto respondents' attentions is a challenge many don't predict. This led to Vidlet discovering that relationship building is just as important as receiving an incentive. Your respondents deserve the same care as your clients because, without them, there would be no study. We build and maintain our respondent relationships by answering any and all questions, over communicating requirements and expectations, and making sure everyone participating has an easy and enjoyable time. We've learned that traditional recruiting isn't going to cut it now that research is evolving. With mobile video technology being incorporated more and more into studies, the quality of respondents is more important than ever. To challenge an industry that encourages serial survey takers in exchange for fast data, recruiters need to revolutionize their recruiting and screening methods. Research is changing, it's about time recruiting changed too.