How to Find and Recruit Research Participants

You can design the perfect interview guide and master every questioning technique, but if you're talking to the wrong people, none of it matters. Participant recruitment is the unglamorous foundation of good research — and it's where many studies go wrong.

This guide covers how to find the right people, screen them effectively, incentivize participation appropriately, and manage the logistics of scheduling.

Why Recruitment Matters More Than You Think

According to research from the User Experience Professionals Association, poor participant recruitment is the leading cause of unreliable findings in user research studies. When you interview people who don't have relevant experience, you get theoretical answers instead of grounded ones. When you recruit only from convenient sources, you get systematically biased data.

Good recruitment starts with a clear answer to one question: Who has recent, relevant experience with the topic I'm studying?

Defining Your Participant Criteria

Before you recruit anyone, define who you need to talk to. Your criteria should include:

Must-Have Criteria (Screeners)

These are non-negotiable. If a person doesn't meet these, they shouldn't be in your study.

• Relevant experience: They've actually done the thing you're studying (not just thought about it)
• Recency: Their experience is recent enough to recall in detail (typically within 3–6 months)
• Role/context match: They match the role, industry, company size, or context you're studying

Nice-to-Have Criteria (Diversity)

These help you build a participant set that captures a range of perspectives:

• Mix of experience levels (novice, intermediate, expert)
• Geographic diversity
• Different company sizes or industries
• Gender and age diversity

Disqualification Criteria

People you explicitly don't want:

• Competitors or people who work for competitors
• People in the UX/research industry (they'll give you "researcher answers" not real answers)
• People who have participated in a study for you within the past 6 months (to avoid professional participants)

Recruitment Channels

Where you recruit determines who you reach. Here's a comparison of the most common channels:

Recruiting from Your Existing Users

Your product's existing user base is often the fastest, cheapest, and most relevant recruitment source.

Email outreach: Send a brief, personal email to users who match your criteria. Response rates for well-targeted recruitment emails typically range from 10–25%.

In-product prompts: A small banner or modal inviting users to participate can generate a steady stream of volunteers. Be careful not to annoy people — make it easy to dismiss and don't show it too frequently.

With Koji, you can generate a shareable interview link and send it directly to your users, embed the interview in your product, or import a list so each person gets a personalised link. Koji can also call them: paste phone numbers and pick a language for outbound calls, or share a call link so they enter a number and Koji calls back. Either way they complete the interview on their own schedule, which dramatically reduces the coordination overhead of scheduling.

Pick the route that fits the study. If you already have the people, a customer list, users in your product, employees, a CRM segment, import them so each person gets a personalised link: you can see who responded, the interviewer greets them by name, and the report is already segmented by whatever you imported. If candour matters more than tracking, an exit interview, an engagement pulse, a sensitive topic, share the generic link and leave the lead form off, so responses stay anonymous. If people would rather talk than type, use the call options above. And if you do not have the people, or you need a market you have no list for, open Panel recruit and Koji finds them across 130+ countries at a price you approve first. All routes land in the same study and the same report.

Recruiting from External Sources

When you need participants who aren't current users, for competitive research, new market exploration, or prospect studies, you'll need external channels. Start with the one built into Koji.

Panel recruit: Koji recruits the participants too. Open the Panel recruit tab on your study's Interviews page and describe who you want to hear from in plain language. Koji maps that to panel profiling questions, shows feasibility and the price per completed interview in credits, and soft-launches about 10% first so you can check quality before the rest goes out. Quotas and study-level screening questions run before the interview, and panel respondents land in the same study as the people you invite yourself. See Recruiting participants from Koji's panel.

Social media and communities: Post in relevant subreddits, Slack groups, Discord servers, LinkedIn groups, or industry forums. Be transparent about who you are and what the study is about. A study from the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that social media recruitment yielded more diverse participants than traditional methods for certain population segments.

Professional networks: LinkedIn outreach works well for B2B research. Personalize your messages, explain why you selected them specifically, and be clear about time commitment and incentives.

Recruitment marketplaces: If you prefer to run recruitment yourself, marketplaces like UserTesting, Respondent or Prolific maintain panels of pre-screened participants and can source a specialist audience. They're expensive but fast, and they handle scheduling and incentives for you. Share your Koji link with the people they find and the interviews land in the same study.

Writing Effective Screener Questions

A screener is a short survey that determines whether a potential participant meets your criteria. Good screeners are short (5–8 questions), clear, and hard to game.

Key principles:

• Don't telegraph the "right" answer. Instead of "Do you use project management software?" (obvious yes/no), ask "Which of the following tools do you use regularly?" with a list that includes project management tools alongside decoys.
• Verify recency. "When was the last time you [did relevant thing]?" with options like "Within the past month / 1–3 months / 3–6 months / More than 6 months / Never."
• Confirm the right role. "Which of the following best describes your primary responsibility?" with options.
• Include a disqualifier. "Do you or anyone in your household work in UX research, market research, or a related field?"

Setting the Right Incentive

Incentives show respect for participants' time and improve show-up rates. Research from Goritz (2006) in the Journal of the Market Research Society found that incentives significantly increase participation rates and reduce no-show rates in research studies.

Incentive Guidelines

Delivery methods: Digital gift cards (Amazon, Visa) are the most popular. Some participants prefer direct payment (PayPal, Venmo). Charitable donations in the participant's name are an option for corporate settings.

Timing: Send incentives within 24 hours of the session. Delayed payment erodes trust and makes future recruitment harder.

Managing No-Shows

No-shows are inevitable. A typical no-show rate for user research is 15–25%, even with confirmed participants and incentives.

Strategies to minimize no-shows:

• Send a confirmation email immediately after scheduling
• Send a reminder 24 hours before the session
• Send a final reminder 1 hour before
• Over-recruit by 20–25% (if you need 10 participants, recruit 12–13)
• Offer flexible scheduling options including evenings and weekends
• Make the commitment clear upfront (exact time, duration, what they'll be doing)

Scheduling at Scale

For studies with 10+ participants, scheduling logistics can become a significant bottleneck. The back-and-forth of finding mutually available times across multiple people can consume hours.

Asynchronous interview platforms like Koji eliminate this problem entirely — participants complete the interview when it's convenient for them, and you review responses on your schedule. This is particularly valuable for studies with larger sample sizes or geographically distributed participants.

Ethical Considerations

• Informed consent: Participants should understand what the study is about, how their data will be used, and that they can stop at any time.
• Anonymity and confidentiality: Be clear about whether responses will be attributed or anonymized. In Koji this is set by the link you send: a personalised link attributes each interview to the person you imported, and the generic link with the lead form off keeps responses anonymous.
• Vulnerable populations: If your research involves minors, patients, or other vulnerable groups, additional ethical review may be needed.
• Data storage: Explain how recordings and transcripts will be stored and who will have access.

Further Reading

• User Interview Guide — what to do once you have participants
• How Many Interviews Are Enough? — determine the right sample size
• Sharing Your Interview Link — distribute your Koji study to participants

Further reading on the blog

• How to Recruit User Research Participants: The Complete Guide (2026) — Recruiting the wrong participants is more expensive than recruiting none at all. Here's the complete playbook: screeners, channels, incentiv
• Best Research Participant Recruitment Platforms in 2026: The Complete Buyer's Guide — Finding qualified participants is the #1 challenge in user research. This guide compares the top recruitment platforms—Prolific, UserIntervi
• User Research Budget Template: How to Plan and Justify Research Spending in 2026 — Build a research budget that actually gets approved. Real benchmarks, line-item templates, ROI arguments, and stage-appropriate guidance — f

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When you need participants you don't have

Koji can recruit them for you. Open the Panel recruit tab on your study's Interviews page and describe who you want to hear from. Koji finds matching people across 130+ countries and shows you the price per completed interview in credits before you launch.

• Targeting and screening. Panel profile data filters people before they arrive, and anything the panel cannot see becomes a screening question asked before the interview starts. Anyone who does not qualify is returned to their panel and you are not charged.
• Quality. Every interview passes a quality check. A conversation under a minute or with fewer than three answers is never billed, and interviews scoring below 3 on Koji's quality scale are free.
• Reporting. Panel respondents land in the same study as your own customers. Koji codes every conversation as it comes in and writes the report with the themes, the evidence behind each one, and clear next steps.

See Recruiting participants from Koji's panel.