Recruiting participants in UX research is just as critical as facilitating the study itself. Speaking with the right people, who match your study objectives and participant profile, is key to gathering relevant data and delivering key insights.

Hubble helps you find reliable, high-quality participants without the usual hassle of recruitment. These aren’t just people looking for a incentive payout, but individuals who are trained to think-out-loud and motivated to contribute to research. By partnering with Respondent and User Interviews, two leading participant recruitment platforms, Hubble connects you to a global pool of more than five million participants across 150+ countries, representing a wide range of professions and industries.

High-quality participants, just a click away

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Why Hubble is the Best Way to Streamline Participant Recruitment

• Streamline research workflow: Design your study, recruit participants, collect data, and analyze results in a single platform. No more juggling multiple tools as everything is managed in one place, saving your team time and reducing friction.
• Access to millions of high-quality participants: Tap into both B2B and B2C audiences across industries and roles. These participants are trained to think aloud and provide thoughtful feedback, so you get insights you can trust.
  Many teams come to us after frustrations with low-quality participants from other platforms, like UserTesting.
• First qualifying participant under 30 minutes: Get your first qualified participants in under 30 minutes depending on the type of participant profile.
• Automated recruitment process: Our integrations handle the heavy lifting by distributing screeners, qualifying participants, and managing incentives. This automation means less recruitment effort for you and more time for you to focus on data sensemaking.
• Target multiple audience types: Hubble allows you to run multiple recruitment projects within a single research study. This is especially helpful if you’re managing more than one participant profile.

The recruiting feature is available based on your team’s subscription plan. Reach out if you’re exploring options and would like to request a trial.

In Hubble, you can cancel participants who provide poor-quality responses (such as missing recordings, short answers, or poor fit). Our support team works closely with you to make sure you get the highest-quality participants.

While there are several recruitment methods available, this guide walks you through the step-by-step process of creating a research recruitment request using an external participant panel in Hubble.

• Pre-requisites
• Creating a Recruitment Project
• Reviewing and Inviting Candidates

Pre-requisites

• Unmoderated study: You need to have an unmoderated study in your workspace to connect recruitment to it. Once a recruitment project is live, you’ll be able to see all associated recruitment projects linked to that study.
• Participant profile: It's important to have all the recruitment materials readily available as you set out the recruitment. Have a clear idea of participant criteria, including demographics, industry, skill sets, and more. The more detailed your profile, the better you can target the right participants for your research.
  • This not only helps refine the participant profile but also speeds up recruitment by narrowing the initial pool of participants to reach out to.
  • You should also consider behavioral traits, not just demographics, to better identify highly relevant participants during screening.

Creating a Recruitment Project

Within your workspace, you can manage your recruitment projects under Recruit Participants tab in the left hand side. You will be able to view and manage drafts, inactive, active, and archived recruitment projects.

• Active: The recruitment is ongoing and requires you to invite, confirm submission, and payout.
• Inactive: is a study that is disabled or paused after our system recruited x3 target sample size.
• Draft: is a draft study that is not yet launched. You can always save and return to the draft study.
• Archived: are projects that are complete.

Step 1. Create a New Recruitment Project

To get started, we need to create a recruitment project. From your workspace dashboard, select Recruit Participants. To start a new recruitment project, click + New Recruitment in the top-right corner of the page.

If you already have an active study, you can also create a recruitment project in the study's Share tab.

Step 2. Select Participant Pool

Hubble gives you access to millions of high-quality participants sourced directly from Respondent and User Interviews.

Respondent offers over 4 million participants across 150+ countries, making it a great choice for general usability tests and broad feedback collection. 

User Interviews provides access to over 5 million participants across various industries and locations, ideal for highly targeted research studies.

There’s no strict rule on which recruitment tool to use, but User Interviews is generally recommended for recruiting B2B participants because of its quality and expansive pool of industry professionals.

Step 3. Project Details

You’ll be taken to the next page, where you’ll need to fill out the project details. These details help define your project requirements and guide participants through the process.

Project details include:

• Project name (internal and external): The internal name is used within your research team to identify the project. The external name is what participants will see.
• External description: Displayed to participants who meet the initial demographic criteria. This should provide a high-level overview of the study.
• Study link: Connects recruitment directly to the study. Invited participants will automatically receive the study link, and their submissions will be tracked.
• Additional instructions: This additional detail is shown to participants once they’re invited. Use this space to share what to expect, how to access the study link, and any other information about what the study entails.

Step 4. Requirements

In this tab, you’ll specify additional research plan details such as target sample size and participant type (B2B or B2C).

• Number of Participants: Set the target number of participants for your study. Hubble will recruit three times your target sample size so you can select from a larger pool.
  Example: If your target sample size is 10 participants, the system will recruit 30 candidates. Once the pool reaches 3× your target, the recruitment project will automatically pause.
• Target Audience (B2B or B2C): The demographic options you’ll see in the next step depend on which audience type you select. To learn more, see our article on the differences between B2B and B2C participants.
• Recording: Specify whether participants should share their screen, audio, or webcam video during the research session.

Step 5. Demography

Defining the right demographic filters is important to make sure your study gathers insights from the most relevant participants. It is worth considering the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool so that insights reflect the broader user base or market segment.

Below are the overall fields to be filled:

• Personal details, including country, age range, ethnicity, gender, education, and household income range.
• Target background information depends on the type of participant you selected in the previous step (B2B or B2C participants).

B2B recruitment adds an extra layer of filtering by allowing you to specify professional criteria such as job responsibilities, skill sets, and more. Be sure to specify these fields to accurately capture the participant profile for your research project. These include:

• Industries
• Job titles
• Skills
• Company size

For B2C participants, you can set:

• Project topics: e.g., Real estate, education, arts, science, and etc.

These filters help target and distribute the study invitation to participants who match your customer profile.

Step 6. Screening Questions

You can further refine your recruitment by using screening questions. These questions should focus on participant behaviors and specific experiences so that they closely match your study’s needs and criteria. Demographic filters, on the other hand, are best for narrowing the pool by broader traits such as age, location, or profession.

• Make sure to keep your screener questions concise and straight to the point so that questions can screen participants early on in the survey.

To add more screener questions, select + Add Question. You can reorder the questions by drag-and-drop. 

Step 7. Review and Submit Recruitment

Make sure your project details, demographic filters, and screening questions are accurate before launching the recruitment project. Any required field left unfilled will be highlighted in red. Use Back to return and make edits as necessary.

If you don’t have all the details ready, you can return later. Your project will be automatically saved as a draft. The recruitment project will also be accessible through the associated study's Share tab.

Once you’re satisfied with your setup, click Submit to begin. Launching recruitment will automatically start sourcing participants who fit your study criteria.

If your study requires multiple participant profiles, you can easily set up additional recruitment projects within the same study.

Reviewing and Inviting Candidates

By partnering with leading recruitment platforms through direct integrations, Hubble lets you find the best-fitting candidates within hours, or your first qualified participants in less than 30 minutes, depending on the study criteria.

Once the study is active, you’ll be able to monitor submissions in real time.

• Overview: Displays the key details of your recruitment project.
• Participants: Allows you to review participant information and screener responses to help you decide whether to invite potential participants.

The Overview tab provides a breakdown of participant numbers at each stage:

• Applicants: The total number of candidates who submitted their screener responses.
• Invited: The number of participants you’ve invited to join your study. By default, you’ll need to manually review screener responses before sending invites.
• Submitted: The number of invited participants who have completed the study. If any submission is poor quality, you can remove it without losing recruitment credits.
• Completed: The number of participants you’ve confirmed as complete, finalizing their submissions.

Reviewing Candidates

Potential participants who submit their screener surveys will appear in the Participants tab. Here, participants are categorized based on how well they match your study criteria. Qualified participants are those who fully meet all of your screening requirements.

Inviting Participants

By default, candidates are not automatically invited. We require users to manually review responses so you can carefully evaluate screener answers and invite only the best-fitting participants. Since it’s common to receive tens or even hundreds of candidates within a few days, this step is intended to help you maintain quality control.

If you find a well-fitting participant, you can invite them by clicking the Invite button in the top right corner of their candidate detail view. Selecting Skip will archive them.

Marking Completion

Participants who have submitted and completed the study will be marked as Submitted. At this stage, you’ll need to review their responses to confirm the data quality. If a response is incomplete, missing a recording, poorly matched, or appears fraudulent, you can remove it and nullify the submission.

If the response meets your standards, select Mark as Complete to finalize it. This action will also trigger the incentive payout automatically.

Marking a participant as complete will tag the person as Completed. You can always filter and review any responses that are complete.

Choosing B2B vs. B2C participants

You have the option to recruit either B2B (Business to Business) or general B2C (Business to Consumer) participants depending on your research objectives.

For B2B research, participants are typically professionals or decision-makers within organizations. They may include executives, managers, or employees who use or influence the purchase of products or services relevant to their business. Recruiting B2B participants often involves targeting specific industries, job titles, or roles that align with the research objectives. Participants have specialized skill sets or expertise relevant to their industry. The article highlights some of the major recruitment challenges related to B2B participant recruitment.

While recruiting B2B participants entails higher costs due to the niche nature of their roles, it ensures that your team engages with individuals who possess the right expertise related to the research objectives.

B2C research typically involves recruiting individual consumers who represent the end-users of products or services. These participants can vary widely in demographics, preferences, and behaviors, depending on the target market. The criteria is more loosely defined than B2B participants, in which you can set project topic areas, such as real estate, games, and travel. Recruiting B2C participants is cheaper than B2B participants but the profile may be more broadly defined.

Deciding whether to recruit B2B or B2C participants depends on the research objectives and clearly defining the participant criteria. B2B participants bring specialized knowledge and insights relevant to specific industries or sectors, making them ideal for studies focused on professional environments or enterprise solutions. Conversely, B2C participants offer perspectives from a broader consumer base, suitable for research on consumer products, services, and experiences.

Use cases and examples of B2B participants

• Software evaluation: Conducting user research to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of a project management tool among IT professionals.
• Enterprise Solutions: Gathering feedback from procurement officers and decision-makers in large organizations to understand their preferences and pain points when selecting enterprise software solutions.
• Industry-specific insights: Interviewing healthcare professionals to explore their workflows and challenges when using electronic health record systems in hospitals and clinics.
• Technical expertise: Engaging software developers and engineers in usability testing sessions to assess the user interface of a developer toolkit or API integration platform.

Use cases and examples of B2C participants

• Consumer facing products: Conducting usability studies with parents of young children to evaluate the design and functionality of a new baby monitor app.
• E-commerce platforms: Recruiting online shoppers across different demographics to participate in remote usability testing sessions for an e-commerce website.
• Mobile applications: Gathering feedback from millennials and Gen Z users through surveys and interviews to enhance the user experience of a social media app targeting young adults.
• Health and wellness: Conducting studies with fitness enthusiasts and health-conscious individuals to understand their habits and preferences.
• Travel and hospitality: Recruiting frequent travelers to participate in interviews and usability tests aimed at improving the experience of a travel booking website or mobile application.

High-quality participants, just a click away

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