I will outline here a method for online recruiting that is interesting for:
• if we exhaust our cold calling list and wish to automate the recruiting process
• and/or to investigate multiple countries simultaneously (using the same questions)
• and/or acquire larger samples and get statistical data for more confidence (quantitative research)
• or to bypass the secretary gatekeepers more easily
Online participant recruiting is interesting for recruiting users, getting surveys completed or organising interviews. You can target consumers (B2C) or specialised professionals (B2B). In the past I had success in recruiting users using Prolific.co which offers a EU-wide pool of 120k active participants. Generally, you are more likely to find higher educated like research/marketing managers, but administrative staff is also well represented (installers probably less so).
How does it work. First, you can filter out people matching basic criteria (e.g. demographics, company size, “food” industry or other) entirely for free. Then you invite those to fill in a screener survey, such as if they are involved in pink ice-cream production. For such invited surveys, I estimate $10 to invite 10 people. Probably only 1 out of 10 qualifies, so after $100 you have 10 matching people. Let’s say 5 out of 10 would be open to a follow-up interview or detailed survey. So basically, you payed $100 to find 5 qualified people who are up for an interview.
Once you have found good matching participants, you’d need to pay them for a telephone interview. In our case you’d ask about $20-40 for a remote 30 min interview (depending on their role).
Bottom line: ($100 + 5 x $30) / 5 = $50 per telephone interview.
Nice: it’s also possible to automate scheduling the interviews in our calendars, by hooking it up to Calendly.
Alternatively, instead of telephone interviews, you can invite targeted users to complete a detailed online survey for about $5-10 per completion (incentive is up to you, but length of survey and role plays a role in motivation), plus an online survey licence for $0 to $25 per month (depends on needs). It takes time to get a well-designed fully automated survey up and running. If we’d require their company name or plan to record interviews, then I’d need to check the anonimity and GDPR laws about how we handle their data. Btw, for online surveys, I wouldn’t worry too much about bots, liars or students, as I found with a well-done survey 98% answered honestly and accurately. If it is a concern there are ways to deal with it (identity checks, attention checks, repeating questions), but Prolific.co generally gets quality participants as they have good rejection/blacklisting mechanisms in place. For Dutch speakers there are also services like respondenten.nl but they tend to be more expensive, besides I don’t expect English language to be a barrier in the Netherlands. Finally, to open up to non-Prolific audience, here is the alternative option of using targeted Facebook/Google ads to attract and acquire interested interviewees, but my guess is this is more work for the effort.
My feeling is to stick to telephone interviews while we can, but consider online recruiting as interesting depending on how many and which people and countries you plan to interview.
Posted by Dan 
Danni's UX Lab 'Lucy' 