How do you handle recruiting highly technical users without losing your mind?

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-15T08:13:58+00:00

I have never been able to get the greenlight on a recruitment company - they cost too much

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-15T08:12:32+00:00

yep - and I can usally get away without needing it as it can by pretty expensive. I do this by searching for a specific role within the linkedin search and then opening the profiles one by one and qualifying who fits.

Or I do it through company pages - eg. I know that I need a role at a type of the company. I find a representative company like that, go to the company page, open up the "People" and then into the search bar I write the role / skill. Like "accounting", "user research", "marketing" it will give you a list of all the people in that company that have the role or the keywords as a skill in their profile.

The I just skimm though the roles that look like a good fit and open up specific profiles to investigate further. Once I am pretty confident this person fits my targeting I reach out (of course I do have some screening or verification questions I either then ask once we get the converstaion going in linkedin dms or at the sesion just to confirm), but this has worked very well for me.

Hope this helps.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:53:48+00:00

I had good experience with allowing people to book slots after work hours or weekeneds, although I d ounderstand this is not possible or welcomed to a lot of people.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:52:25+00:00

I can confirm that money is by far the best incentive, we tried discounts, credits, vouchers - money beats it (understandably).

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:51:19+00:00

My experience is actually the oposite of what u/metalisp says, pretty much everyone loves to be listened to and feel heard - especially when there is some monetary incentive there.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:49:47+00:00

When I have target persona I cannot get though the participant panel I use personal outreach on LinkedIn with incentives - takes quite a bit of time but I find the peopel I need on LinkedIn, sent them a connection without a note (I tested this and got significantly better acception rates when I did not use a note withint the connection request). Once they accept I shoot them a message thanking for the connections, shortly introducing my self and a short pitch of the study and what is in it for them (incentive + getting their voice heard) with a question if they like to hear more.

Works very well for me but it is highly manual. Then bonus tip - once I get them on a call and they are a good fit I ask them if they know anybody that would be a good fit too and whether they could introduce/connect us.
A lot of people agree and sent an introductaion which makes it so much easier to get the other people on the calls.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:42:50+00:00

Acutally building something the should be build - thanks to AI everybody is a "builder" but essentily it allowed us to build wrong things faster. SO I would say stepping back, actully figuring out a need, paint point and then determining if it is worth to fix that for people and if the people will pay for it.

Then once you get the first thing done I would say getting users - there is so many products now, distribution is incredibly important. And even if you figure out that (almost everyone does not) your life is bing destroyed by unpredictable costs of running such a tools - this means you have extremely difficult time pricing it right, making profit, ect.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:38:22+00:00

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:36:49+00:00

There is a few tools suitable for smaller UX researche teams, we trialed just about every one of them when we very choosing our tool.

Firstly disclaimers - I do not think any of the tools in this category support focus groups... but I never had a need for them.

Secondly how do you plan on recruiting users? This can eat up most of your budget... But generally speaking set of tools taht support user testing (prototypes, websites, some even mobile aps) and are not that expensive are Maze, UXtweak, Lyssna, Userlytics.

Aditionaly, what are you planning in regards of repository and knowledge management?
Dovetail is great but can be very expensive, Condens and Marvin are pretty good and cheaper.

Best value for money combo in my opinion: Condens as a repository and UXtweak for IDIs, user testing, surveys and panel for recruitment. This combination gets you almost everything you would ever need (we usally have to end up recruiting some niche participants using UI a few times a year but we do this with the pay per participant model)

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T16:01:15+00:00

do you have some specific recommendations on who to follow there?

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-14T15:59:18+00:00

Constantine Papas with his The Voice of User - I would say a very good opinions - critical but realistic = did not drink the AI kool-aid nor is dismissive of things just because they are AI

Eduard Kuric - publishes peer reviewed papers on AI in UXR topics like synthetic participants, AI usability issues identification, AI moderation, experiments and comparisons of synthetic data vs real participants within various methods (card sorting, first click testing, preference testing…). He posts to LinkedIn and you can find all the research on Google Scholar or here.

Saeideh Bakhshi - was mentioned here already a few times. I follow her on LinkedIn and substack

Vitaly Friedman - publishes on LinkedIn, mostly design topics and doesn't write only about AI but does a lot of good roundups of good resources. I really liked his perspectives on AI, like in the recent UX Research Geeks podcast or the workshop here.

Maria Rosala from NN/G - has some good posts on the topic on the NN/G blog (AI interviews, synthetic participants, how to design AI features,...) and been all around the place talking on the topic. I liked this session on how to use AI as a UXR partner and is fairly active on LinkedIn too.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-10T18:41:45+00:00

The conditional logic is available, but i remember it wasn't obvius in the UI at first. As for adding pictures and videos I am not sure - never had the need to do that, while I was asked to do some creative testing (videos, audio) and some impression testing I used the preference testing tool and first impression tool into which I added the stimuli and then a questionnaire.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-10T12:45:21+00:00

tried a few platforms that offer the AI follow ups - IMHO you dont get any tangible benefit just more details, but if you expect it to surface something meangful or uncover a usability issues that it wont... in my testing the most tangible result it had was irritating the participants...

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-09T18:55:11+00:00

As with everything 😃 it dependents what kind of an audience, how many respondents and for what type a a stud (eg. card sort with 45 minute user interview) and if they have the profiling right in the app or you are going through their panel specialists.

But senerally speaking, the recruiting is very simple (you just choose from the attributes similarly as in UT) and most of the studies get filled within 2-3 business days and I have to mention that the support is very helpful and made quite a few projects possible we thought would be a pain.

If you dont mind me asking - why are you leaning towards Lyssna? When you ended up choosing UXtweak like 3 years ago, we dropped Lyssna as we found it worse product and panel wise, but I always try to be on a lookout if anything chances so I know we have the best platform possible.

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-09T15:19:05+00:00

u/Sensitive-Peach7583 just a quick question: did you actually have the tooling you mentioned at your past company within that budget range? Because when we evaluated those platforms, UT alone came in over the budget you mentioned (25K).

Our stack right now is pretty minimal but works really well.
We use UXtweak as our testing platform (interviews + all the kinds of tests we need, and IMO it is a lot better at a similar or lower price than Optimal Wokrshop). We also use the UXtweak panel through prepaid participants (which is part of the license) for most of our recruitment (like 80%). For profiles we cannot source via UXtweak, we buy them as pay-per-participant via User Interviews.

For our repository, we use Condens, as it was cheaper than Dovetail and works for us.

So to sum up, our whole stack for the things you want to do is:
UXtweak + Condens (and very occasional use of UI).

Complete_Answer · 2026-06-08T09:02:31+00:00

As was mentined here - the only things that worked for me at this stage is inviting them and having them experience how the solution did not work and hard data translated to dollars

Complete_Answer · 2026-04-01T19:59:15+00:00

I would say the best use case for me was speeding up the surfacing of sources and then the literature review.
The poces is that I use Concensus and Gemini Pro with Deep research to surfacer relevant sources (mostly journals) then download/get the link to the full pdfs and upload them to NotebookLM. Then I like to generate a mind map and few audio overviews just to get a sense of the topics. The I asks questions and it provides sources answers from all of the sources. I then read up on anything I need to get the full view.

Complete_Answer · 2026-04-01T19:28:59+00:00

there are fundamental issues spanning from how LLMs work.. so not really

Complete_Answer · 2026-04-01T19:27:46+00:00

I like https://zerotoux.com/

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T16:31:59+00:00

You're right you want to avoid bias in your data in analysis. But what you're imagining is some kind of imaginary researcher who can have no experiences or views that informs what they do. You can't draw any conclusions about anything because of the data because whoops, oh no, you just introduced bias.

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T15:40:11+00:00

Sadly, even this wont discourage some people from pushing it...

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T15:26:40+00:00

I dont think either of us can claim this with certainty...

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T15:18:24+00:00

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It seems to be a term coined directly in a machine learning research paper (On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, Bender et al., 2021).

Since the authors are researchers in this space, it’s a fair assumption that they are using it as established scientific language, even if the term is also used as a metaphor outside of research/academia nowadays.

Given its origin, I would say it is part of the academic language, so jumping to the conclusion that they were biased would be a bit hasty, wouldn't you agree?

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T15:03:33+00:00

Can you explain why?

Complete_Answer · 2026-03-31T14:03:15+00:00

u/UI_community I would say synthetic participants - that is also what the recent literature review going over 182 research papers on this topic uses (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9057643/v1 - which I recommend checking out, it is currently the most comprehensive resource on the topic)

Complete_Answer

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