In-Depth Interviews: Contact, Screen, and Schedule participants
When you have a completed and approved screener, then you can start the recruiting process. Depending on your organization, budget, and project context, your team may do the recruiting and scheduling, or you may have an outside agency handle part or all of the process. In either case, someone will contact prospective participants by phone or email, and then use the script described above to determine if they fit the screening criteria or not.
The advantage of recruiting by phone rather than by email is that you may be able to contact customers, screen them according to the criteria, and schedule them for a research session all in one sitting. The problem with this approach, on the other hand, is that you often don’t reach people the first time, and so leave a message on a machine or with another person who answers the phone, and this can get messy. Using email to make the first contact is simpler in terms of logistics, and can be done much faster. The problem with using an email as the first contact is that it is hard to distinguish your recruiting email from the onslaught of other emails from similar companies, with wording that appears similar to yours, but whose message customers are avoiding like the plague.
If you are conducting the recruiting in house, and a prospective participant has passed through all of your screening criteria (i.e. they weren’t screened out), then you will need to discuss the time and location of the interview. Scheduling gets tricky because your participants probably have a few different time slots available during the research period, you want to nail down the time and date of their sessions, but then you may find other participants who can only come during time slots that you’ve already scheduled. There may be some opportunity for back and forth maneuvering, but in general you are stuck with scheduling decisions you’ve made. You can deal with this by asking participants for several time slots, tell them you are scheduling them at a particular time on a particular date, but that you may need to contact them again to move if they are still available at the alternate times. Behind the scenes, the people making these calls have the screener script, a table of screener criteria with maximum and minimum numbers of participants who match each of the criteria, a calendar, a map of the research site and surrounding area, and a scheduling sheet with all the dates and timeslots (and lots of scratched out writing).
Once people agree to participate and are placed into the schedule, you should follow up with an email to confirm the details. The follow-up email should include:
- A detailed map to the research location
- Phone numbers of people to contact if there are challenges getting to the site
- Phone numbers of people to contact if they have any questions prior to the sessions
- Any special instructions required to find the specific room or to get through security
- Reminders about any homework that needs to be completed prior to the session
- A passionate plea to be on time, perhaps with some added threats about reduced compensation if they are late
- Notes about parking, if relevant (in big cities it is very relevant!)
Send another email the day before the session that duplicates this information in a slightly different format to get their attention. If something has occurred between the time they agreed to participate and the day of the session and they are not planning to attend, you really need to know this. They may be embarrassed, so you’ve got to craft your message to get their attention. You may want to call each participant the day before their session to confirm that they will be attending.