GutCheck Recruitment Engine

The Recruitment Engine provides access to demographic screening, behavioral targeting questions and custom screening questions to narrow down our universe of panelists (US consumers, aged 18 and older) to the people you are interested in interviewing. We have over 3.5MM people in our panel, so there is a good chance you are going to find the person you are looking for. In the future, we’ll have the ability to enable business to business, teen and pharmaceutical panel selection for recruitment.

Demographic Screening

Demographic screening includes basic filters such as age, income, gender, etc. We will quickly let you know if we have someone who fits the demographic profile you are looking for. If demographic screening is not enough, we also have a long list of behavioral questions (e.g., Do you own a pet in your household?, In the past 12 months how many times have you rented a car?) which have been answered by a good number of the panelists. By leveraging these behavioral screens, we can provide another real-time glimpse of who is immediately available in our respondent pool.

Custom Screening Questions

Lastly, there are customer screening questions which have several uses.

Why ask a custom question?

Custom questions can be asked for two primary reasons.

1. To qualify a respondent and make sure they meet your requirements when our behavioral screening questions don’t meet your needs; or
2. To inform your chat in advance and learn a little bit more about that respondent

There are three types of custom screening questions. Here is how and why you should use them:

1. Free Form Answer– use a free form question to access open-ended information from your respondent. An example of this type of question is “When you think of Cleveland, Ohio, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Please be as specific as possible.” Whatever answer the respondent types is the answer you will see appear when the respondent arrives. You cannot terminate a respondent based on their response to a free form answer, but you will have a chance to review their answer prior to accepting the chat interview.
2. Single Answer– use a single answer question when you want to limit the choices the respondent has to select an answer from to one. You can qualify or disqualify the respondent based on the answer they select or you can use the question to inform your chat. An example of this type of question is: “How frequently do you watch college football on TV during the season?” A) Every week, B) Every couple of weeks, C) A few times during the season, or D) I don’t watch college football
3. Multiple Answer – use a multiple answer question when there are one or more answers that a respondent could potentially provide. A typical question of this type might be “Please check which of the following websites you visit one or more times per week. Select all that apply.” A) CNN.com, B) FoxNews.com, C) msn.com, D) MSNBC.com, E) weather.com, F) espn.com. You can find out a lot about a person’s behavior, as well as screen them out of the chat session if they don’t select one or two specific websites you want to chat with them about.

Words of caution – Custom questions provide you with a great deal of screening flexibility. However, you might find you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

When asking custom questions, remember the following:

1. Ask questions in a simple and straightforward manner
2. Use a conversational tone
3. Avoid leading the witness by asking the question in a biased way that suggests or implies certain answers
4. Be as specific as possible so that a respondent knows exactly what a question is asking of them and what is implied by the answer they are selecting. If you want to talk to someone who reads the newspaper 5+ times per week, design your question and answers to reflect what you are looking to find out.
5. The more questions you screen on, the more difficult and time consuming it will become to find a respondent.
6. You can always revise the questions or any of the screening elements if the wait time is too long or you feel you need to change the criteria