Recruit (beta)

Recruit helps you find and manage participants for research within your Dovetail project. It connects you to a diverse database of over 3 million people through Respondent, allowing you to define target audiences, set recruitment criteria, screen participants, and schedule sessions, all in one place.

Please note the following limitations of Recruit at this time:

• We currently only support external recruitment, internal recruitment is not available at this time i.e. bring your own participants.

• Users can only recruit B2B and for interviews only. B2C is not available at this time.

Managers and Contributors can access recruitment by navigating to the Recruit tab within a project. To set up recruitment, you must first connect your calendar (powered by Cronify) and conferencing tool.

• To do this, open your project, click the Recruit tab, and click + New to begin setup.

• From there, connect your calendar and video conferencing service, powered by Cronofy. Note: this is a one-time setup.

You can set up recruit for your project in one of two ways:

• Use AI to generate your plan from a prompt or;

• Build your plan manually by filling in each section yourself.

Option 1: Use AI to generate your recruit plan

• Start by adding your research objective, this can be anything from a single sentence, a brain dump paragraph, or a specific requirement. Dovetail’s AI will take your objective and automatically generate and fill out your entire study plan for you.

• Once you’ve added your objective, click Generate plan. Dovetail will create a complete recruit plan draft. Review the Overview page, add your availability, and confirm payment when you’re ready.

Tip: For best results, include any important details in your objective, like the job titles or industries you want to recruit from. The more specific you are, the less guesswork we need to do!

If you’d like to make changes, you can easily edit any part of the plan by using the sections in the left-hand sidebar. And if anything feels off, don’t forget to leave feedback, we’re always improving our AI!

Option 2: Build your plan manually

Prefer to skip the AI? No worries! You can create your recruitment plan step-by-step. Here’s what you’ll need to enter:

• Details: Add an internal title, external title, description, source, study type, and time required.

• Criteria: Define who you want to speak with: add the number of participants, their locations, job titles, and industries. You’ll see an estimated audience size based on your criteria.

• Availability: Select your preferred date range and time slots. If you’ve connected your calendar, we’ll pull your availability automatically.

• Screener: Add screener questions to qualify or disqualify participants. Questions can be single select, multi select, or open text.

Recruit (beta) currently operates on a pay-as-you-go model, requiring users to input a credit card for a one-time upfront payment when creating up recruitment for their project.

You will be charged based on the number of participants required for your study plus an incentive fee. For example, if you require 5 participants, you will be charged a recruitment fee per participant and incentive fee per participant. See a breakdown of this below:

• Recruitment fee: For sourcing and managing participants for B2B moderated interviews, Dovetail charges a $75 fee per participant.

• Participant incentive: This is the incentive each participant will receive for their time. Participants will receive payment on their end once they have been marked as Attended by a Dovetail user.

Coming soon: We’re planning to introduce a credit system to offer more flexible payment options. If this sounds helpful, please reach out to our Sales team to register your interest.

Once recruitment is live, potential participants who meet your criteria will start to appear. You can review their responses to screener questions, as well as associated demographic details.

After reviewing participant profiles, you can mark them as:

• Qualified: The participant meets your criteria and can be invited to book a session.

• Disqualified: The participant does not meet your criteria and will not be contacted.

This updates their status in the recruitment flow. If a participant is qualified, you can invite them to a session by clicking Invite. Once invited, they’ll receive a notification with details of the session and who will be running it.

Participants who book a session will automatically appear as Scheduled. These bookings sync with your connected calendar.

After the session, you can mark participants as Attended to trigger incentive payments or mark as No show if they didn’t attend.

• To update a participant's status, navigate to the participant's profile and click •••

• Next, select the appropriate status. Participants marked as Attended will be automatically added to your Contacts database.

You can also cancel a scheduled participant if you no longer need them. Navigate to the participant’s profile, click the ••• menu and select Cancel session.

If you’ve reached your target number of participants or want to temporarily stop participants coming through the pipeline, you can pause recruitment to stop new applications.

• To pause recruitment, open the Recruit tab in your project and click Pause recruitment.

Alternatively, when all sessions have been completed or you no longer need to continue sessions, you can end recruitment for your project.

Before ending recruitment for a project, make sure all participant sessions have been updated to reflect their final status — Attended, Canceled, or No show. This ensures that participants are properly informed, no one is left expecting a session that won’t happen, and eligible participants receive their incentive payments.

• To do this, open the Recruit tab in your project, navigate to Options button and select End.

Participants marked as Attended are automatically added to your Contacts database. You can sync participant fields at any time by clicking the Field sync button. This ensures their information stays up to date in your database and is ready to use when conducting follow-up interviews or future research. Turn on the metadata fields to be synced, then map their attributes to your workspace’s custom Contact fields to ensure proper alignment.

What countries can I recruit participants from?

Recruit is powered by Respondent, which gives you access to a vast and diverse pool of research participants from 150+ countries.

Respondent’s primary target markets include 21 countries (from a total of 242 targetable countries): Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines,Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Check out Respondent’s documentation for a full list of available countries as well as their panel book.

What are the top industries and job titles I can recruit participants from?

• Industries include Computer Software, Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Marketing & Advertising, Internet, Computer Games, Healthcare, and Education.

• Job titles include Software Engineer, Teacher, Management Analyst, Salesperson, Operations Manager, Marketing Manager, Chief Executive, and Healthcare Worker.

How much should I pay for an incentive per participant?

The incentive for research participants depends on factors like interview length, expertise, and effort required. As a guide, standard rates range from $25–$50 USD for short (15–30 min) interviews to $100–$250+ USD for in-depth (60–90 min) sessions, with specialists often requiring $150–$500+ USD.

Hard-to-reach participants or those providing expert insights may need higher compensation. Fair incentives help increase participation, reduce drop-offs, and ensure ethical research practices. Offering competitive rates aligns with industry standards and respects participants' time.

What are some best practices for writing screener questions?

Effective screener questions are vital for recruiting the right study participants. Below are some tips for writing screener questions:

• First, clearly define your ideal participant, including both qualifying and disqualifying criteria, then structure your screener like a funnel, starting broad and narrowing down with elimination questions first.

• Write clear, concise, and unbiased questions, avoiding jargon, leading statements, or binary options that reveal desired answers. For example:

  • Bad example: "Wouldn't you agree that our app is user-friendly?"

  • Good example: "How would you rate the user-friendliness of our app on a scale of 1 to 5?"

• To ensure accuracy, disguise your specific study criteria by embedding them amongst distractors. Always include quality checks like "red herring" questions to identify inattentive respondents. Keep the screener brief—ideally 5-10 questions—to prevent participant fatigue.

• Finally, always pilot your screener with a few external individuals to identify any confusion or errors before launching recruitment.

How can I request a refund for my study?

In specific cases, you may request a refund by contacting support@dovetail.com. Any refunds will be issued only to the credit card used for original payment.