The secret to getting properly qualified participants

Why standard screening often fails — and how to design recruitment that brings in the right people, not just the people who know how to qualify.

Marketers often assume that recruitment is straightforward: write a screener, send it to a panel, and get the participants you want.

But screeners don’t work the way most people think.

They tend to select for professional respondents — people who have learned how to pass screeners — and exclude the real consumers you actually want to hear from.

Fortunately, there are ways to fix this.

Key takeaways

Standard screeners tend to attract “professional respondents”, not typical consumers.
The best participants are often screened out because they don’t know how to “game” the questions.
Subtle, indirect screening reveals genuine behaviour and avoids coached answers.
Short, simple, well-designed screeners are more reliable than long, technical ones.
Good recruitment is less about who you target and more about how you ask.

1. Many respondents learn to game screeners

Panels reward people for qualifying into surveys.
So many respondents gradually learn:

which answers get them in
which brands to claim familiarity with
which usage patterns sound “right”
how to avoid being screened out

This means you often end up with:

people who say they buy a brand weekly but don’t
people who exaggerate frequency or involvement
people who claim experience they don’t actually have

It’s not fraud as such — it’s adaptation to a system.

Summary:

Traditional screeners often select for people who know how to pass screeners — not the people you want to speak to.

2. The best participants often fail standard screeners

Meanwhile, the people you do want — real consumers — often fail because:

they answer honestly but don’t match the exact wording
they don’t recognise brand names in a list
they don’t describe their behaviour the way surveys expect
they don’t think like category experts

For example:

A real pesto buyer might say they “sometimes” buy Sacla’, where a coached respondent will confidently choose “weekly”.

A real cider drinker might not know the exact sub-brand they had last weekend.

In other words:
Panels screen out real behaviour and screen in artificial behaviour.

Summary:

Your ideal participants are often rejected simply because they don’t speak the language of screeners.

3 — Indirect screening reveals genuine behaviour

The solution isn’t more questions — it’s better questions.

Indirect screening works because it:

avoids signalling the “right” answer
doesn’t tell respondents what the category is
pulls people in through natural behaviour, not coached responses

Examples:

Instead of “Which pesto brands do you buy?”, ask:
“Think about the last time you made pasta at home — what did you use?”
Instead of “How often do you drink cider?”, ask:
“Tell us about the last time you chose a drink for yourself. What did you pick?”

These questions uncover real usage and real memory, not trained claims.

Summary:

Indirect screening makes it harder to fake behaviour — and much easier to reveal it.

4 — Shorter screeners work better than long ones

Many researchers try to solve screening problems by adding more questions.

This usually backfires.

Long screeners:

encourage guessing
make coached respondents even more successful
exhaust real consumers
increase dropout
introduce more bad data than they remove

The best screeners:

are short
are simple
rely on indirect cues
use one or two decisive filtering questions

Think of screening like choosing apples:
It’s better to gently feel for quality than to poke and prod until the fruit is damaged.

Summary:

Long, technical screeners do more harm than good. Short, indirect ones are more accurate.

5 — Clearer screening = better insight

When you select better participants, everything downstream improves:

richer open-ended answers
more believable reasoning
more useful contradictions
clearer themes
cleaner patterns
fewer irrelevant opinions
more confidence in your decisions

You don’t need “perfect recruitment”. You just need better alignment between behaviour and selection.

Summary:

Improving recruitment improves everything that follows.

Why this matters for marketers

If your screener questions select the wrong people, nothing else in your research can compensate for it.

Better screening is one of the simplest — and most overlooked — ways to improve the quality, honesty and usefulness of consumer insight.

Whether you’re testing packs, concepts, messaging or product ideas, using smarter screening helps you hear from the people who actually matter.

If you’d like to strengthen your recruitment

We design indirect, behaviour-based screening into all of our surveys so you get deeper, clearer, more reliable insight — without length or complexity.

If you’d like to explore whether this could help your next project, just get in touch.
Or email directly: richard[at]mrqual.com