Qualitative research is all about people. Understanding what makes them tick and using that understanding to generate actionable business strategy from deep human insights is what you do. It's a fascinating job, but we know that it's not always an easy one.

Qualitative respondent recruitment is an essential part of that process, and you need the recruitment to be right. The participants in your research are the 'raw materials' you will build your report upon, and if they are wrong in any way, like ingredients in a recipe, the cake won't rise or it just won't taste right…

Your experienced recruiter understands that, and realises how vital their role is in helping to ensure your precise needs are met and your client's research objectives fulfilled. They are the experts in bridging this gap, between the skills of your craft and the general population on whom you wish to bring those skills to bear. They are also experienced in representing the qualitative research industry ethically and responsibly to the wider world.

You have duties of commercial confidentiality to your client, but if you treat your recruitment partner as a professional associate and contract an NDA with them, you can disclose your end client and their research objectives and work with them, to create a recruitment process that will best deliver exactly the right participants to achieve this. They can read between the lines with you and identify the givens, the assumptions and easily-overlooked leaps-to-conclusions that can cause vital points to be overlooked.

For your client these things may be too obvious to even make the screener. For example, the criteria 'must not be vegetarian' in research for a fried chicken house… so obvious, but if all the recruiter knows is that the research is for a fast food chain – and the respondent checks out as buying their regularly for their family, they might even feel warmly toward the brand – then all other things being equal they may wind up getting recruited, and distort and confuse the group when this 'by the by' fact emerges.

If you don't share your true objectives with your recruiter, you are missing out on the chance to use their professional experience to your advantage. If you are paying for a high standard of service you should be able to benefit from everything they have learned in their organisation's history of professional development and expertise. To take another example, in the luxury skincare market an experienced recruiter can eliminate in one brief question array anyone who has substance allergies, dermatological history, extreme environmental or socio-political views or a simple lack of interest in the category (even if they use it regularly), that could cause them to be a poor or unhelpful respondent in your group.

Specialist recruiters will know your clients brand and research it for themselves if they do not, to identify the fundamental yet unspoken things that will make for a good or bad respondent on the night. Let them add the value they can bring to your process and use their experience and knowledge to enhance your fieldwork. Subcontractors can only align themselves with your business objectives if they know what they are in the first place – it sounds like such an obvious point, but if all they receive is a templated screener and a heavily-redacted brief you will not get that added value.

Similarly, you need to trust your recruiter if there is a problem with the sample criteria. If hundreds of participants screen out, then that doesn't mean the recruiters are lazy, obstructive or failing – it means there is a problem with the criteria or typology somewhere, and no-one is better placed to identify what that is than your recruiter. If you treat their feedback as a finding in its own right, you can work together to identify what needs to shift to unlock the process and get the recruitment moving again, as well as potentially refreshing and updating your assumptions about the entire brief.

If you want intelligent, responsive and accurate qualitative respondent recruitment in the UK, you need to talk to Saros Research Ltd about your next project.

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