External Recruitment | User Interviews

External Recruitment with Great Question via User Interviews

Source qualified participants from User Interviews' panel of 6M+ verified consumers and professionals — without leaving Great Question.

What is External Recruitment?

External recruitment lets you source participants from outside your own panel when you need to reach audiences you don't already have access to. Great Question partners with User Interviews to connect you with their verified B2C and B2B panels. When you submit a recruitment request, User Interviews matches participants based on your targeting criteria, and qualified candidates are automatically imported into your study. From there, you screen, schedule, interview, and pay incentives entirely within Great Question.

Why It Matters

Reach audiences you don't have. When your internal panel doesn't cover the demographic, profession, or behavior you need, external recruitment fills the gap with access to 6M+ participants across 18 countries.

Keep everything in one place. Externally recruited participants flow directly into your study. You screen, schedule, and manage them the same way you would any internal candidate — no context switching between platforms.

Move fast. General population participants typically arrive in under 3 hours. Professional audiences take 1–3 days. Real-time audience estimates help you gauge feasibility before you publish.

Stay consistent. Screener scoring, eligibility rules, and deduplication all apply to external participants the same way they do for your own panel, so your research quality stays uniform.

How It Works

The external recruitment workflow has four main steps:

1. Submit a recruitment request. Define your target audience, write a public title and description, and submit a recruitment brief to User Interviews.
2. Screen candidates. Participants complete your screener survey through User Interviews. Their responses sync back to Great Question, which automatically qualifies or disqualifies them based on your ideal and disqualifying answers.
3. Conduct the research. Qualified participants book interview times from your available calendar slots. You conduct interviews and manage everything within Great Question.
4. Pay incentives and recruiting fees. Incentives are distributed automatically via Tremendous after you mark participants as complete. Platform fees are billed separately.

Common Use Cases

Prerequisites

Before you can use external recruitment, your study must meet all of the following requirements:

Pricing & Credits

Funds can be drawn from your account wallet or the card on file, similar to funding incentives. Study funding will display at the top of the study dashboard.

All recruitment request payments are in USD and managed through Great Question. View Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pricing below, or contact [email protected] for our Enterprise discounts.

If you have purchased credits, each recruited participant costs one credit, billed through Great Question and transferred to User Interviews.

Security & Data Protection

When you recruit participants from User Interviews’ proprietary audience, you and User Interviews act as independent Controllers of participant personal data. Each party is responsible for how it processes that data within its own systems and for meeting applicable data protection obligations.

User Interviews maintains recognized security and privacy certifications, including:

• SOC 2 Type II
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 (Information Security Management)
• ISO/IEC 27701:2019 (Privacy Information Management)

You can review additional details about their security controls and practices on the User Interviews security page.

When customers leave the service, User Interviews purges or removes customer data containing confidential information from its application environment in accordance with industry best practices.

How to Set Up External Recruitment

Step 1: Enable external recruitment in your study plan

When creating or editing a study, navigate to the Plan page and toggle on Recruit external candidates. Enabling this option automatically turns on both the Screener and Incentive settings, as both are required for external recruitment.

You can enable this on a draft study during setup or on an already-active study from the Plan tab.

Step 2: Configure your screener

Navigate to the Screener page to build your qualification survey. The screener determines whether a participant from User Interviews qualifies for your study.

Your screener must have at least 2 fields. For each question, mark ideal answers (these determine who qualifies) and disqualifying answers (these automatically reject participants who don't meet your criteria).

Supported field types include single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, number range, short text, long text, number, date, email, and website. Skip logic is supported on single choice, multiple choice, and yes/no fields.

Step 3: Set up incentives

Navigate to the Incentives page and configure a monetary incentive through Tremendous. The minimum incentive is $5 USD. This is the amount each participant receives upon completing the study.

If you need guidance on how much to offer, check out User Interviews' Incentive Calculator.

Step 4: Create a recruitment request

Before or after publishing your study, navigate to the Recruiting tab to configure your external recruitment request. The form has three main sections.

General information. Provide a public title (max 100 characters) that participants see when viewing your study on User Interviews, a public description explaining what the study involves and who you're looking for, and the maximum number of candidates you want to recruit (1–150).

Audience configuration. Define your target audience using available filters organized into the following categories:

The form provides a real-time audience reach estimate that updates as you adjust filters, so you can gauge whether your criteria are too narrow or too broad before publishing.

Submission timing. You can choose to submit the request immediately when you publish or save it as a draft to review and submit later.

Step 5: Review costs and publish

Before publishing, review the cost breakdown in the sidebar. Recruitment fees are separate from the incentive amount you pay each participant. The total recruitment cost is calculated as the number of participants multiplied by the fee per participant.

How Participants Are Managed

Once your recruitment request is published, User Interviews sources participants from their panel based on your criteria. Participants complete your screener through User Interviews, and their responses sync back to Great Question. Each participant is imported into your study as a candidate with a proxied email address, and their demographic and professional data is stored in their profile.

Screener responses are scored against your ideal and disqualifying answers. Participants are automatically qualified or disqualified. Qualified participants book interviews by selecting from your available calendar time slots. When they book, the session is automatically created in Great Question.

After the interview, mark the participation as Completed + Send Thanks, and incentives are issued automatically via Tremendous through User Interviews.

External participants do not appear in your internal panel or candidate list. They remain User Interviews participants but function identically to internal candidates for screening, scheduling, interviews, and incentives within your study.

Participant deduplication. Great Question uses a global identifier from User Interviews to prevent duplicate participants across your studies. If someone has already participated in one of your studies, they can be filtered out automatically.

Past participation filtering. You can optionally filter out participants who have completed studies with your account in the past. Options include filtering those who have never completed a study, or those who haven't participated within 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, or 12 months.

Managing Your Recruitment Request

Once a request is live, you have several management options:

Best Practices

Before you publish. Check the audience reach estimate before submitting your request. If the estimate is very low, broaden your filters — overly narrow criteria are the most common cause of slow or stalled recruitment. Make sure your incentive amount is competitive for your target audience; User Interviews' Incentive Calculator can help.

While recruitment is active. Monitor your study dashboard for incoming candidates. General population requests typically deliver participants in under 3 hours, while professional audiences take 1–3 days. If responses are slower than expected, review your screener complexity and incentive amount.

After interviews. Mark participants as Completed + Send Thanks promptly. Incentives are issued automatically via Tremendous through User Interviews once the completion status is set. If a participant has trouble redeeming their incentive, share User Interviews' Participant Resources with them.

Troubleshooting External Recruitment

FAQ

Still need help? Contact us at [email protected] — we're happy to help!