Recruitment is the most underrated part of research today

I've had dozens of conversations recently with client-side insights and marketing leaders who are frustrated with what they get back from their research partners – the big-name firms especially. The conversations always begin with proposed fixes around the same types of things: methods, in-person vs. virtual fieldwork, AI vs. human respondents, and the strength of the team behind the work.

They rarely, if ever, begin with recruitment or the people who are ultimately the heartbeat of any research process.

I firmly believe that recruitment is the most underrated part of market research today, and that most of the issues people have with qual can be traced back to how well the recruitment is done – and whether it's being done by the team responsible for the research or outsourced to someone less invested in the end result.

In any research, recruitment is the foundation that you ultimately build from. Everything else is downstream. Get it wrong and there's no method, no moderator, or rockstar analyst who can save your project.

This is the idea Faster Horses was built around from day one. And here's how it looks in practice:

I'll begin fieldwork on a client project in ten days from now, but I've already personally met every single respondent. I've already learned a great deal about these people, built rapport with each of them, and developed a feel for the terrain I've been asked to illuminate. I have a short summary of my conversation with each respondent I can refer to before reviewing diary submissions, or moderating a focus group – which means I'm primed for every interaction I'll have.

Have I allowed doubt about our approach to creep into my mind since we launched Faster Horses? You bet. It's time and resource intensive to meet every single respondent, and there has been more than one moment where I've considered replacing the pre-project 1:1 calls we do with something more asynchronous or automated.

But after this latest project, I'm done doubting.

Market research has become too extractive and too transactional.

Extractive in that we tend to under-compensate respondents for their time. And, in that we pay little attention to their experience as participants in our work.

Transactional in that we've stripped humanity out of it, and are too focused on efficiency rather than building connections with the people whose lives we're trying to understand.

I get that resources and timelines are finite. But surely this isn't the way forward.

Top of mind for me is a screening call I had with a mom of three from Edmonton last week. She stopped me mid-call and thanked me for simply reaching out as a human. Many others also thanked me for taking the time to answer their questions or address their curiosities about market research – because a lot of them have never participated in it before.

When we treat respondents with respect, pay them fairly, and take the time to build a real connection before fieldwork starts, two things happen:

• First, the learning begins before the research officially does. By the time fieldwork commences, you've already established baseline familiarity with these people – what they care about, what's animating them, what they're contending with. That context helps you interpret and react to what they say in the moment once things get underway. You have a more nuanced conversation.

• Second, respondents feel a sense of heightened accountability. They give you more when you take the time to build a personal connection with them. Before they complete a single diary exercise, you've already asked about their lives. You've talked about the weather, cracked a joke or two together. That's the difference between a stack of surface-level diary entries and ones where people put real effort into giving you what you need.

Scaling a human touch is hard, but it's not impossible. Plenty of hotel brands manage to do it successfully - and not just the super expensive ones. It's why we've been investing in building tech to automate everything else that is in service of this level of human connection so that we can deliver for our clients.

Protect the human aspect of recruitment, moderation and sense-making. Automate everything else.

To that end, we recently launched our new recruitment portal — partly to automate the admin side of recruitment (a solution we're now happily whitelabeling), and partly to give clients greater visibility into the composition of their study long before fieldwork begins.

Instead of waiting on a clunky XLS update over email, clients get a clean card-based view with a bio of every respondent. They can watch the casting take shape in real time, and we can talk about the triangulation we're doing to ensure we get a diverse and useful mix of perspectives for their project.

Here's a demo project we built, if you want to see how it works.

But the portal isn't the point. The point is that the report you read at the end of any research project is ultimately downstream of choices made weeks earlier.

Fix the inputs, and the input process – the rest then tends to take care of itself.