Building Recruit—the inside story of Dovetail’s recruitment tool

Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on Recruit—our all-in-one solution that streamlines participant research by providing a single, seamless platform to find, manage, and connect with individuals to recruit for participant sessions.

Recruit is a product born from our own needs, shaped by rigorous user feedback, and designed to streamline the often-complex world of research participant sourcing and management.

We’re excited to announce that Recruit is now in open beta, giving you direct access to over three million research participants through our partnership with Respondent. Recruit allows you to seamlessly recruit the right participants and kick off research projects faster—all from within Dovetail. 

We’re diving into the journey of bringing Recruit to life—the challenges we faced, the invaluable feedback that guided us, and the real-world use cases that have shaped it into the powerful tool it’s becoming today.

A researcher’s perspective: building for our own needs

Researchers are often tasked with delivering crucial insights to the business within demanding timelines—sometimes just a few short weeks for an entire end-to-end research project. Yet, the very first hurdle, participant recruitment, can quickly devour a significant chunk of that precious time. Weeks can vanish in the process of finding, engaging, and scheduling the right individuals.

The research journey itself is often fragmented, demanding researchers juggle a multitude of disparate tools. This constant context switching not only disrupts workflow and reduces efficiency but also introduces the risk of valuable data getting lost in the shuffle between platforms.

For our senior researcher here at Dovetail, Anahita, and our wider team, Recruit has been a gamechanger. Anahita says that one of the first tasks she ever did as a researcher was setting up a community of customers and research participants. She spent months evaluating recruitment tools and convincing customers to sign up, after which she thought the hard part was over. But a new challenge emerged. 

“I’d become a bottleneck for my team.”

Anahita found herself becoming a central point of contact, inadvertently slowing down the research process. Her deep understanding of the existing system meant that team members relied solely on her for participant access. Tracking customer interactions, chasing session logs, and managing recording uploads became time-consuming tasks, adding to the complexity of an already fragmented workflow. Even the crucial step of linking participant contributions back to the resulting insights proved to be a significant hurdle.

We built Recruit to solve these very real pain points. Recruit is designed to eliminate friction associated with participant recruitment, making it easier than ever to find, manage, and link participants to research—whether it’s exploratory interviews, concept testing, task-based interviews, card sorting, journey walkthroughs, or retrospectives, everything you need is in one platform.

Iteration and development: building with Dovetail

At Dovetail, we’re firm believers in "eating our own dog food." We rely heavily on our own platform to understand our customers and, naturally, we used Dovetail extensively to build Recruit. 

Ideation for Recruit emerged out of conversations within our team about the opportunity a recruitment tool could bring to our customers. Following these, we set off on a journey of discovery. Collaborating cross-functionally internally across engineering, design, and research, and conducting extensive research with customers, we identified jobs-to-be-done, the pain points in the process of recruiting research participants, and how a product like Recruit could fit into the wider market and Dovetail ecosystem. As part of this discovery we found that our customers were losing valuable data. By using Dovetail for customer feedback analysis and a separate tool for participant recruitment, customers had a whole lot of valuable data from the recruitment process that was slipping through the cracks between platforms.

Getting things right

Our team has taken an iterative approach to building Recruit—prioritizing building quickly and iterating quickly based on customer feedback. This allows us to learn extremely fast—identifying what works and, crucially, where we need to improve or change direction.

We knew that with this approach we’d get some things right and some things wrong in the process of developing Recruit. One thing we got right was that from the start, we identified that for Recruit to be successful, we needed to invest in the hidden and often forgotten “People database”. This meant looking into how customers were associated with data throughout the product and finding ways to bring them more front of mind. We moved the People database out of Settings and gave it its own user interface with contextual updates. We renamed it to Contacts, improved participant allocation and assignment, and set it up as a supporting feature across the product. 

Now, Recruit participants are automatically added to Contacts, complete with all of their meta data—bridging any data gaps between recruitment and analysis. Contacts also has AI summaries and links to all of the research that they have contributed to, simplifying feedback tracking and providing valuable contact-level insights.

Navigating roadblocks

For the scheduling experience in Recruit, we originally incorporated the ability for customers to put their own scheduling links in, using their own tool like Calendly or Google Calendar. Internal testing was key to driving improvements here, pushing for notifications, and refining side panel navigation. Importantly, we were able to identify points of friction and a major hurdle within the scheduler experience—participant anonymity was lost in the process of adding their own scheduling links. We anticipated this could be a significant issue for certain customers, and the ability to protect the participants’ email and contact details was also contingent on us using Respondent, the platform we’ve partnered with for participant recruitment. 

We were quickly able to solve this and came up with a solution that would better meet our customer needs and help us overcome the roadblock. The team found that integrating with Cronofy was a way to streamline the experience of scheduling while protecting participant contact information. Links could now be automatically added in the scheduler without sharing participant email addresses with the researcher.

Our road to launch

Closed beta testing was instrumental in surfacing issues around discoverability, incentive management, and our refund experience. It also sparked conversations about embedding more customization into the feature. We had around 20 customer workspaces participate in our closed beta. We were having conversations with customers every day and new features were being developed off the back of their feedback. 

Recruit is in open beta, meaning everyone has the opportunity to try it out. Now with over twenty five features across recruitment, scheduling, incentives and participant management, Recruit has become a robust product that closes the circle for any team conducting research.

Recruit is designed to make finding the ideal research participants fast and effortless. You can tap into our database of over three million verified individuals across 150+ countries and quickly pinpoint your perfect match based on criteria like job titles, industries, or skills. Dovetail handles the groundwork, presenting you with the most relevant candidates, so you can simply review, approve, and begin your research immediately—no more starting from zero.

Try it today or schedule a chat with our team to learn more.