Editor’s note: The authors are principals at Cascade Insights, Oregon City, Ore.

Recruiting is never an easy task. First there is the work required to develop a reasonable recruit profile. Sponsors or clients typically ask for “best case” profiles at the start of the project. For example, “Find me individuals who have used our product, switched to Competitor X and then switched back to us (a win-back), and then make sure they reside only in zip codes that end with 4 (and don’t ask me why).”

Understanding what to include in a recruiting profile from a cost-benefit analysis perspective is a bridge that anyone who fields a research study must cross early. But once the process of developing a rational recruiting profile is complete, you have to sit down and find those individuals who meet that profile.

So, for the purposes of this article let us assume that the process of identifying a good recruiting profile is complete. Let us also assume that we are looking at a series of in-depth interviews (IDIs) rather than a focus group. Finally, let us assume that the population isn’t so generic that you can simply buy a list.

Where do you find your interviewees? How do you reach out to them? What means exist to get the largest number of the right people, while screening out those who do not meet the profile?

And let’s also assume that simply buying a list and carpet-bombing with e-mails isn’t going to do it. In our experience, many of those with relevant expertise don’t align nicely with the boxes that the demographers check, such as:

  • consultants who’ve successfully deployed open-source software to small businesses;
  • vice presidents of manufacturing who have worked in the heavy-machinery industry and who have supported heavy lifting-equipment deployments worldwide;
  • directors of finance with more than 10 years of experience working for educational institutions.

Recruiting profiles like the above make things a good deal more interesting.

Best tools

Your first steps for some of these scenarios are to find the “center mass” of individuals who would have the expertise that you want to query. Some of the best tools that exist out there today to support this type of inquiry are the social networking sites such as LinkedIn that are frequently used by job searchers, recruiters and the types of folks who would network 24/7 whether they are looking for a job or not.

Following are a few tips to help you more effectively recruit candidates for qualitative market research studies from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn groups

If you took a poll of LinkedIn users, you would probably find that some love LinkedIn groups and some don’t even know that they exist. But from a recruiting standpoint, they can be a golden resource.

Contacting people through group affiliations rather than directly with InMail is essential, because LinkedIn limits the number of InMails you can send based on the type of account for which you sign up. (For example, the $50-a-month basic account allows 10 InMails per month.) Ten InMails, even with a high response rate, aren’t going to net a worthwhile number of interviewees.

However, the number of messages that you can send to other members of a share group is not limited at all. While group members may opt out of receiving private messages, most don’t.

While LinkedIn limits your group membership list to 50 groups, your ability to drop in and out of groups is unlimited. So if you were doing a research study on cloud computing, for example, you could join those groups and drop them when the research recruiting is complete. And, generally speaking, there are groups for almost any alumni association, technology, business skill, current or past company employment, nonprofit or interest.

While we wouldn’t recommend bombarding the discussion boards of individual groups with blanket requests for expertise on a given topic, we would recommend utilizing the groups as a way to quickly find individuals who have the required expertise and reach out to them with personalized messages.

Saved searches

We’ve also found that a number of LinkedIn users don’t realize that you can save searches and have those searches e-mail you back new results on a weekly or daily basis. This can be useful for taking the pulse of certain industries or areas of expertise without having to do any extra polling. When the need arises, you can just open these e-mails and quickly generate a recruiting list.

Advanced searching

When searching across multiple countries, at first LinkedIn appears to put up a roadblock. LinkedIn’s “Location” box allows the entry of only a single country. But if you dig deeper into the advanced options, in the [Filter By] menu on the left side of the search results page, under the [Location] header, each time you type in a location in the search box under [Show more...] and hit the return key, that location shows up in the list of locations above. You can continue typing in new location names under which to search for prospective respondents.

In general, LinkedIn is good for recruiting in what we would call the former British Empire. You’ll find a good set of candidates in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada and the U.S. Obviously there is some overlap here with other English-speaking countries as well, which often will be a prerequisite for your research. One other area of overlap is where LinkedIn has launched a local portal. For example, there are a number of German employees on LinkedIn, due in no small part to the presence of a country-specific portal that LinkedIn developed for German users.

LinkedIn is not as good for trying to identify candidates who live in Asia, the Middle East or Central or Eastern Europe. While you’ll find pockets of users in these regions, the pickings will be slim.

Also worth mentioning is Xing. If you are looking for predominantly European candidates for IDIs or focus groups, Xing has many similarities to LinkedIn and can be a very good place to search.

Taken the time

Simply offering to contribute to someone’s favorite charity, sending a gadget, or promising something for free isn’t always going to be incentive enough to engage target recruits, especially if the target is someone with a lot of expertise.

However, what might work when more traditional means fail is making clear that you’ve taken the time to truly understand this person’s background. Prior to the advent of social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Xing and even Facebook, you had to know someone who knew the person in order to gather much information beyond the person’s current employer and title.

Today, you can craft incredibly personal recruiting e-mails that highlight a person’s career experience (with sufficient ego-stroking) as the rationale for your attempt at an interview.

Think of it this way: If someone said to you, “Based on your profiles on the Web showing that you’ve worked on X, Y and Z for Companies A, B and C, I think you’d have great insight to offer into a subject we’re researching.” How would you react? At a minimum, you most likely would give the e-mail a second read, and you would have more incentive to reply positively to the e-mail than to an obvious form letter.

Everyone likes to be complimented and recognized for what they have achieved, all the more so in what has become a nearly knowledge-driven economy where the skills you have and the narrative you can build about your own career are what set you apart from others.

And given that all the profiles we are talking about are public, isn’t it obvious that the folks we’re talking about in this article want you to notice them?