Behavioural Recruitment Real 1200

How Behavioural Recruitment will refresh the research industry

Tom Woodnutt

Tom Woodnutt

Feeling Mutual

Tom Woodnutt is Founder of Feeling Mutual, the agile online and mobile qualitative research specialists. He helps clients and agencies run global studies and offers training in the space. Tom has been a Digital Skills trainer for the Association of Qualitative Researchers (AQR) and is a regular speaker at industry conferences, including the MRS, MRMW and IleX.

Tom Woodnutt and Hugh Carling presented a paper on Behavioural Recruitment™ at the IIeX conference on the future of market research earlier this year. In case you missed it, check out this summary and download the full paper, including case studies. 

Behavioural Recruitment will help us move towards a more sustainable, natural and valid way of recruiting the best possible people into primary research.

Research results aren’t right if recruitment is wrong

Your results can’t be right if the recruitment is wrong. Many clients and researchers say that a small pool of participants is being relentlessly over-fished. The same people are taking multiple surveys and reappearing regularly in group discussions. This creates two major problems:

  • People will say what they think is required to get the incentive
  • Such frequent participation makes their responses less valid as they become less representative of a typical consumer

Given that validity is the lifeblood of the research industry, this is a big issue that needs addressing.

The market research industry is under threat

For years as an industry, we’ve blissfully floated along, perhaps taking our status as clients’ primary providers of insight for granted. However, recently we’ve become increasingly concerned that this status is in danger, for a number of reasons:

  • Failure to predict big events - our high profile failure as an industry to predict big events, like the US election and Brexit, pulls our credibility into question.
  • The backlash against experts - researchers will be left out in the cold if clients make more decisions without referring to our expert consumer insight.
  • The increasing number of behavioural data sets - businesses can find out what people do, without even having to ask them.

It’s essential that we prove the value of primary research and show how it can reliably add essential value to the behavioural data already available.

We need authentic, fresh and representative participants

In the context of all these pressures, it’s more important than ever for us to source the most authentic, fresh and representative participants at the heart of our research. The validity of research participants is the foundation of our integrity and therefore value. We think the targeting functionality of Behavioural Recruitment enables us to do this in a way that’s never before been possible.

Behavioural Recruitment: The world’s best panel?

Behavioural Recruitment is powered by Facebook’s unparalleled data on what people actually do rather than what they say they’ve done. Facebook’s hyper-targeted advertising platform, in tandem with the Liveminds Facebook application, delivers truly representative research participants. Liveminds has successfully used this approach to recruit thousands of fresh participants of every age, in more than 65 countries, for qual, quant, online and face-to-face projects.

Facebook knows us so well

A study by Stanford University and the University of Cambridge revealed that a computer model based on Facebook likes, knew more about its subjects than their closest friends and family. But Facebook’s knowledge of our behaviour goes way beyond the ‘Like’ buttons you click. Facebook utilises 98 different data points on their users. It makes perfect sense, that an industry dedicated to finding and talking to people who genuinely match specific criteria, and want to talk about a particular subject, should utilise such a hugely powerful technology. Especially when you consider that Facebook has a global reach that is more than 100X bigger than the biggest panels.

Behavioural Recruitment and flash research

Flash Research with Behavioural Recruitment could be more valid and affordable than MROCs, client panels & omnibus surveys. Flash Research - means running multiple, fast turnaround quant and qual dips using fresh participants each time. In a matter of hours a client could have the data at their fingertips, cutting out significant costs by reducing the need for expensive community management software and resources. It would also be more valid as people are not over-sensitised to the process and only used once.

A more sustainable future for the research industry

Our purpose as researchers is to get closer to what the right people really think, feel and do. Behavioural Recruitment powered by social media data is an important step for us. As the technology driving this approach gets even more powerful and that data even more comprehensive, so will our ability to quickly find the right participants for any project. And our industry will become stronger as a result.

Download the full paper, including case studies, by entering details in the form below.


Download 'Behavioural Recruitment Powered by Facebook'

This paper reveals how Facebook's hyper-targeted advertising enables you to recruit people based on what they do, not just what they say. Enter your details below to download the paper.

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