Creative Recruitment

So, Time Magazine decides that its person of the year is ‘us’, that the big story is about ‘community and collaboration on a scale never seen before’. Funny that, because most qualitative researchers could have written this story any time over the last ten years — if not before.

The challenge for the qualitative community, however, has been to find the people who matter; not just those who are buzzing with ideas, but those who value their privacy, who might not appear on any Census, who might be part of an increasingly niche group.

We’re talking creative recruitment here, in all its many manifestations. A trawl of a random collection of field and recruitment database companies reveals a broad spread of client (and researcher) demands when it comes to respondents, some old and some new.

As might be expected, the internet is driving many projects. Field Initiatives’s Liz Sykes says: “Researchers all seem to have the same idea at the same time. So everyone will want people to do diaries, then camera tasks — and now the current vogue seems to be blogging and podcasting.”

Another version of this, according to Gareth Roberts at Safari Research, is the ‘digital salon’. “This is where we get people to say that they would take part in a chat room scenario,” he says. “They’d agree to go online at least twice a day (once in the morning and once a night), and we’d send them links to find out what sort of sites they would visit.”

Focus groups thrive

The one thing that all those interviewed agreed on, however, is that — despite new methodologies — focus groups still thrive. There may be a lot more depths, accompanied visits, panels and workshops, but groups still hold sway. Jon Swingler of Interiority talks of it as a ‘testing ground for the creative stuff’. Gareth claims 90% of his business concerns focus groups.

These may not be the focus groups of old, but in this industry the wheel also tends to go full circle. New methodologies are thriving, but there are some clients who — having commissioned accompanied shops, getting consumers to film themselves — then decide that a whole week spent editing respondents’ films is not the most constructive use of their time and revert back to group discussions.

Yet there are other trends, too. While some companies are asking for smaller groups to be recruited — between four and six people at a time, instead of up to nine — to keep costs down, there are those who want to sign up a whole family at a time for groups. The latter has proved useful if members are involved simultaneously, and they get good incentives.