What is Quality Verified Recruiting?

Instead of rescreening, a common quality control measure, we record and audit all telephone conversations with participants.

Why? Simply because it is the best way to ensure proper recruiting. A respondent that is coached or led to qualify is generally smart enough to know how to answer during a rescreening call.

Not only does rescreening fail catch the "PRO's", is doesn't catch the interviewers that create them. Therefore, the cycle continues...Poorly trained and supervised interviewers training honest respondents to cheat in order to qualify. (Click the side link to listen to our NPR radio story)

Are you getting the Quality Recruiting You Are Paying For?

Is this what you want to base your findings on?

Is this what your client expects?

Do you even know this goes on every day in recruiting centers around the country?

So how can you ensure that every question on every survey is asked as designed and as intended?

Introducing A Higher Standard of Recruiting?

So how can you ensure that every question on every survey is asked as designed and as intended?

Our Verification process starts with digitally recording every call. Then each and every recruit is audited for accurate execution!

Our interviewers know this and we tell every respondent that they are on a recorded call.

Auditing calls for accuracy and quality. It's the only way to truly know what is happening on each and every call. Recording all calls is our way of knowing that each screener was properly administered from introduction to invitation.

Listening to recordings also helps us provide guidance in improving screener questions that may be confusing to respondents.

It’s accurate execution, every time, every call.

Plus, we can prove every recruit was done right if the need ever arrises. You can to the difference, You can listen for yourself.

 

A CHEATER is a respondent who will strategically fabricate and adjust his/her answer in order to qualify for a research project.

A good recruiting system prevents cheaters and repeaters from participating. Adding criteria such as, “no more than 5 groups ever” will not keep untruthful people out of your projects, but it may very well screen out good, honest research participants.

Some respondents are quite good at cheating and have honed their skill for years. Sadly, most cheaters start out as honest respondents. But if “helped” to qualify by un-monitored or poorly supervised recruiting centers they soon believe that our industry wants them to cheat. Just listen in on the humorous but troubling story on the NPR broadcast on this page.

In some cases, management and clients may play a role in the cheating in order to simply "get the job done" thereby avoiding difficult conversations on low production and working with clients to adjust qualifications and question format to accomplish the research objectives.

A REPEATER, on the other hand, is a respondent who wants and likes to participate. Perhaps they participate more often than they should because they have been allowed to do so.  If allowed, repeaters can turn into cheaters, but this won't happen in the right recruiting environment.

Clients also play a role by creating screeners that result in extremely low incidence recruits. This often results in respondents answering 15-20 minutes of questions only to hear, “I’m sorry we won’t be able to invite you to this study. But we will call again and thank you for your time.”

Ask yourself, how many times would you be wiling to spend 20 minutes on the phone and not qualify before you say… “Take me off your list” or start to guess your way in?

Another issue is call-in’s. Was this person already screened? Are they already on another study? Is this a second or third attempt to qualify? How do you know that people calling in are pre-selected for your study?

Remember cheaters are quite ingenious. They will call multiple times in an attempt to qualify. They will also alert their friends about which recruiting services have what studies going on.

Most recruiting agencies rely on reams of paper lists to provide respondent names to call. When a person calls in, it is up to the interviewer to find their name on the list to see whether they were pre-selected for the study and to confirm they have not already terminated.

It's a highly fallible process. It treats the respondent, our industry’s most valuable resource, very poorly, as they must wait while their name is located.

By deploying advanced automation everywhere we can.
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1. Our proprietary database system removes the problems inherent in paper sample management. By distributing sample electronically to each interviewer’s desktop computer, we empower every interviewer with the gate-keeping tools needed to track in-and-out-bound calls.
2. Callers are instantly validated by phone number to assure they were selected for a current project and that they did not terminate already.  If they can’t be validated, they can’t be screened.
3. Our system also prevents…
   1. Selected respondents from calling back for a second attempt to qualify
   2. Friends from calling in because they heard about the study
   3. Cheaters trolling around for the next research opportunity.
4. All CALLS ARE RECORDED. We state this during our greeting. We also tell respondents we are looking for thoughtful and honest answers.
   1. This prevents coaching on the part of the interviewer.
   2. It also lets the respondent know that we won’t accept deception.
5. Once identified, cheaters are marked in our database and prevented from further participation.
6. Our sample creation process, by default, excludes respondents from EVER being invited to any client’s research projects more than once. So, as a client, you will not see the same participate more than once-ever.

We are so proud of our recruiting standards that we happily submit recruited respondents to SIGMA VALIDATION .

New hires must complete a three-stage training and testing program that covers the industry, interviewing skills (including reading verbatim, and probing), and use of our online recruiting system.

Each interviewer also receives weekly coaching based on notes taken during the auditing process. In addition, our auditing system has a custom designed call evaluation tool. Interviewers are reviewed monthly based on the 4-8 evaluations.

Before an interviewer begins recruiting on a new project they must read the screener, listen to an audio-taped briefing, and must pass a project knowledge test administered by their team lead. This provides assurance that interviewers assigned to your project know what they are doing.