Five screener fixes that work better than tightening

A list of five ways to improve participant quality without adding more screener criteria, each of which drops genuine targets. Cut criteria to the truly disqualifying ones, verify against records where you can, add an open question that asks for episodic detail, measure your checks on your own data, and screen widely then classify sessions from transcripts. Use it when you are redesigning a screener. Koji interviews produce full transcripts, which makes classifying sessions after the fact practical.

Where this appears

• Tightening Your Screener Makes the Sample Purer and the Findings Worse (2026)

What's in this guide

1. Cut criteria to the disqualifying ones: Keep the two or three where a wrong answer makes the session worthless. Move the rest into the interview or loose quotas.
2. Verify instead of asking: Check criteria against account data, telemetry or CRM fields wherever a record exists. A verified fact cannot be gamed.
3. Make the second test different in kind: Ask for episodic detail, such as the last time they did it, start to finish. People who have not lived it cannot produce it.
4. Measure your checks first: Test attention checks and speeder flags against sessions you have already classified, and compute how many bad ones they catch.
5. Widen the screen, narrow at analysis: Let borderline candidates through, then tag each session as on or off target from the transcript.