We’ve written a lot of blogs that discuss how important screening guides are for market research recruitment. The same applies when recruiting for B2B studies.
Before we dive into how you can improve B2B screening guides, let’s first review the basics of what a screening guide does for the recruiter.
At their most basic, screening guides ensure that the individual you’re talking to meets specific eligibility criteria. Depending on the scope of the study will determine who is and isn’t eligible to participate in a study. Once you’ve gone through this first filter, the next portion of a screening guide helps ensure that you are recruiting a mix of individuals that are representative of demographic you’re wanting to include in the study. Some qualitative market studies are very niche, or specialized, and it’s sometimes necessary to do a double screening.
When creating a screening guide for a B2B market research study, here are additional considerations.
Don’t use broad categories or definitions.If the focus of a study is aimed at educators. Educator covers a lot of different categories, so narrowing down the definition will ensure that you’re only recruiting educators who are appropriate for the study.
Job responsibilities, not job titles, are what matter. Don’t ditch screening for job titles altogether. Including this is an important part of the screening guide, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing across different organizations, which is why including job responsibilities is more important.
Ensure the candidate is knowledgeable and articulate. Qualitative studies are smaller by nature, and if a participant can’t clearly communicate and isn’t very knowledgeable about the subject matter, then they are not a good fit. Including open questions in the screening guide is one way to filter for knowledge and clarity when communicating. The recruiter can record the screening interview and the researcher can compare how respondents answer the open questions. This can help figure out who to ultimately recruit to participate.
Keep it short and organized. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, screening guides need to strike the right balance between being short enough to engage with potential recruits, while being long enough to identify who is most qualified. Especially when recruiting for B2B studies, the length of the screening guide matters! Organizing the screening guide in such a way so that it can quickly filter out people who don’t qualify is also an important feature of B2B screening guides. Ideally, your B2B screening guide should be no longer than 12 to 15 questions and should take 10-15 minutes to complete. Any longer and you risk losing qualified people because they lose patience or are frustrated by too many questions.
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