Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
People, not Petri Dishes: Stories from a Research Recruiter
Summary
Less than a year ago, we opened an in-house participant recruitment service at Atlassian, a 3,000+ employees tech company, for anyone who wanted to do research. During that year, the Research Recruitment team grew to two people and serviced over 150 people who do research. In this talk, I share what our main learnings were, the pitfalls of opening a free-for-all recruitment service, and some of my top participant recruitment tips.
Key Insights
-
•
Manual recruitment processes with many tools (Qualtrics, spreadsheets, Calendly) quickly become unsustainable as volume scales.
-
•
Qualtrics is excellent for screener surveys but not designed for end-to-end qualitative recruitment workflows.
-
•
Offering swag boxes as incentives is as popular as e-gift cards and accommodates participants who cannot accept cash.
-
•
Treating recruitment as a service can lead to unrealistic expectations about turnaround times and product quality.
-
•
Involving research leadership is crucial to prioritize requests and maintain research quality by saying no to some.
-
•
Recruitment needs to be collaborative between researchers and recruiters due to domain expertise and nuances.
-
•
Moving to a highly supported self-service model empowers researchers and better scales recruitment efforts.
-
•
Protecting participant PII and managing outreach lists requires careful anonymization and strict data governance.
-
•
An internal research panel is helpful but not necessary—external vendor panels can suffice depending on the product.
-
•
Building a participant community and updating consent processes improve engagement and trust over time.
Notable Quotes
"If you want a unicorn ask for a unicorn and so lo and behold Sarita turned out to be a bit of a unicorn."
"Recruitment is a collaboration between you, the researcher, and me, the person doing recruitment."
"It’s not a one-stop shop, this is people we’re dealing with, not Petri dishes."
"Qualtrics is fantastic for quantitative surveys and screener logic but isn’t made for qualitative recruitment workflows."
"We don’t talk about incentives, we talk about thank you gifts to avoid implying participants are employed."
"People started to view recruitment as a service like an IT help desk, expecting fast turnarounds."
"Saying no was really tricky because everyone has a good reason for their research."
"We’re moving to a highly supported self-service model so researchers can recruit themselves with tools and vendors."
"We want participants to feel like part of a community and improve how we share research outcomes with them."
"Protecting PII means anonymizing data when sharing and being careful not to post emails on company-wide pages."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Service delivery is led by frontline staff who tend to have the least amount of power in the system."
Shanti Mathew Natalie Sims Natalia RadywylCivic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake
December 9, 2021
"You can’t make your team happy, no one can ever make anyone else happy ever, ever."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"There’s more contracting work coming because teams are smaller and have to bring in external hands."
Dave Hoffer Joanne WeaverUX Job Search AMA #3 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
July 16, 2025
"People in our environment had an allergic reaction to happiness or delight, so we used sentiment or satisfaction instead."
Louis Rosenfeld Jose Coronado Rachel Posman Guneet Singh Crystal YanThe Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
October 23, 2019
"The heart of the storyteller is actually the heart of the story."
Jon FukudaStorytelling for DesignOps
August 17, 2023
"Participation rates are falling, engagement rates are falling — this is a data quality crisis."
Jemma Ahmed Robert Fabricant Sean McKay Llewyn Paine Kate Towsey Noah BondTheme Panel
March 11, 2025
"Legislation like the US executive order on federal customer experience has helped us rebuild trust in government."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"No reconfiguring, no manual tweaks, no app hopping. One place, one view, and a system that finally works for the people living in it."
Tristin OldaniLearning the Part I Used to Hand Off: How Building the Systems Made Me a Better Designer
August 20, 2026
"Drivers continued the practice of hanging out in physical base camp spots despite platforms saying they wanted to get rid of them."
Prayag Narula Rida QadriHCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
March 28, 2023
