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People aren't perfect

People aren't perfect

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Can we ever promise perfect recruitment?

I’ve been doing a project with a really great recruitment agency. They have a large panel of respondents (we approached thousands of participants) and the recruitment questionnaire we devised was pretty nifty, so it meant no one could tell what our ‘target’ subject was. Every respondent was also carefully pre-checked. It was gold-standard recruitment.

And yet… I still got a couple of respondents who had claimed to have seen the ad we were interested in at recruitment, and then it turned out when I showed it to them they hadn’t.

Grr very frustrating!

What went wrong?

Actually I don’t think anything went wrong. I think the respondent really honestly thought they’d seen the ad because they pattern-matched it with the very famous brand I was researching. They thought they had. They wanted to take part in the research (they wanted the money) and so they believed they had seem the ad.

If I’m right, it means we’ll never be able to get exactly what we want out of recruitment because people will always turn out to be mistaken, confused, unreliable.

And if that’s right it means we need to take a new approach to qualitative recruitment

First, agencies need to be careful what they promise their clients – we need to educate clients that a certain number of respondents in the project won’t be on quota.

And then of course, we need to built some slack into research design and recruitment to take this into account (time and money).

We used to ‘over-recruit’ in case respondents didn’t turn up on the day. That’s less of a problem now and perhaps we’re better off focusing on ‘stand-by’ recruitment so we can ‘mop-up’ interviews that don’t quite work out.

We’re working faster than ever these days and turning round projects as soon as they’ve been kicked off, so we’ll need to be clever and develop ‘just in time’ ways to recruit our stand-bys. But on-line technology means we have a better chance of doing that, so let’s come out to clients about imperfect recruitment so that we can deliver better work.

kath-handonheart

Kath Rhodes, Qual Street Owner

I love love learning and so I invest time and resources with Ambreen and Claire into exploring social psychology, neuro science, creativity and new techniques in research. Read all about it and help yourself to the ideas that will deliver your business the insight it needs

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@Qualstreet on 17 March 2023