It seems that anything related to artificial intelligence (AI) gets a lot of attention, and market research recruiting is no exception. There are a number of market research recruiting agencies that specialize in AI-assisted recruitment. While there is certainly a role for technology in recruitment, we’ve heard from moderators and researchers that have used AI-recruiting agencies that the quality of the candidates recruited to participate in market research studies is no match for humans leading recruitment efforts.
Market research is a social science, and it is all about the people. When you turn over a critical aspect of a study over to technology, you’re more likely to end up with participants that may meet the minimum criteria, but that doesn’t always make for a good recruit.
So much of what our team of recruiters do is engage with potential participants and get a feel for how honest they are in their answers, how familiar they are with the subject matter being studied, and how easily they engage with technology (often a requirement for online focus groups and mobile ethnography studies). When our recruiters screen potential participants they are not only assessing how well potential candidates communicate, they also rank the responses to screening guide questions so that the end result is a strong pool of participants. We attribute much of our success as a nationwide market research recruiting agency to the fact that our recruiters know how to read people and know what the client is looking for in its recruits.
There is no doubt that market research recruiting takes time and effort, and we appreciate why some people may feel that they can hasten the process by introducing AI to the recruiting process. Technology certainly plays an important role in recruiting, and our jobs would be much harder if we didn’t have a database of interested candidates to pull from, or software to assist us in project managing each market study. We are definitely not ‘anti-tech’, but we are ‘pro-people interaction’, especially when it comes to recruiting.
Market research is an investment and it doesn’t come cheap. We fully understand the desire to save money and look for ways to cut down on the time it takes to fill a study. One of the surest ways to save money is to partner with an experienced market research firm and recruiting agency. Established agencies have likely seen and done it all when it comes to types of studies and recruiting, and have learned ways to streamline. We’ve certainly become more efficient in our recruiting abilities over the years and we pass the savings and our experience on to our clients.
Contact us today to learn more about our approach to recruiting.
