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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
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Manual recruitment processes using tools like Qualtrics and spreadsheets are time-consuming and inefficient for scaling research participation.
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Offering participants a choice between swag boxes and e-gift cards improves engagement and accommodates different preferences and legal constraints.
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Implementing a Jira service desk ticketing system helped track recruitment requests but created a perception that recruitment is a simple 'service,' which it is not.
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Collaboration between recruiters and researchers is critical, as recruiters lack deep product knowledge and require researchers to help refine screener questions.
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Research leadership’s involvement is essential to prioritize requests and decide when to decline recruitment, balancing resource constraints and research quality.
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Moving from a fully managed service to a highly supported self-service recruitment model empowers researchers and improves organizational scalability.
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Careful communication about incentives as 'thank you gifts' rather than payments helps maintain ethical and legal standards and improves participant perception.
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Managing participant data carefully with anonymization and privacy safeguards is vital, especially under GDPR and other local legislations.
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Building community and engagement with research participants enhances their experience and may improve long-term panel quality.
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Capacity planning can be improved by scoring recruitment complexity, considering factors like international reach and participant accessibility.
Notable Quotes
"If you want a unicorn, ask for a unicorn — and so lo and behold, Street got in touch and she indeed turned out to be a bit of a unicorn."
"Participant recruitment is not a one-stop shop or online shopping — these are people we’re dealing with and there’s a lot of nuance."
"We always say thank you gifts instead of incentives or payments because it’s a way to reimburse people without making it feel like a job."
"When you just feed the beast — the requests keep coming in and it’s unstoppable without clear boundaries."
"The Jira ticket system made recruitment feel like a service desk you just put a ticket in and expect results quickly, but it’s much more complex than that."
"Collaboration between recruiters and researchers is critical because recruiters don’t know all the details of each product or study."
"Research leadership, like Lisa, has the wider view to know what’s already been done and to help filter requests effectively."
"Offering swag boxes globally had its challenges but was worth it for participant engagement alongside e-gift card options."
"We don’t want participants to feel like they’re just petri dishes to be used and discarded — quality and respect matter deeply."
"Moving towards a highly supported self-service model is a watershed moment that makes everyone happier and research better."
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