Shortlists: screen your own panel before you commit

Friday Drop 003. A proper three-stage process for recruiting from your own panel: shortlist the people you might want, send them a screener, review their answers as candidates, then decide. If you've been adding panellists straight into a study, this is your cue to stop.

Friday Drop, batch number 003. Three rows of circles narrowing like a funnel: a wide row of outlined circles, a shorter row beneath it, and two filled circles at the bottom. Underneath: Shortlists, screen your own panel, then decide

Friday Drop, batch 003. Screeners started life as a way to qualify people you don’t know yet. You share a link, with your email list or a group you already know, they answer a few questions, and you decide whether they’re right for the study. What we hadn’t really considered was teams screening their own panellists, and plenty of you do. So we’ve rebuilt the route from panel to study. If you’ve been adding panellists straight into a study and then sending them a screener, this is the week to switch.

Watch video with transcript

What was happening

You have a panel of hundreds of people and a new study. You want to screen all or some of them to see who’s a good fit. So you’d add them to the study and send them a screener.

That’s where it fell apart. The moment someone is in the Participants tab, they’re in. When they filled in the screener there was nowhere for their answers to land where you could review them. The process had no middle.

Shortlist, candidates, participants

Every study now has three tabs in that order, and the order is the process.

Shortlist is people you might want. Add from panel, filter it down the same way you filter anywhere else, and pull them in. Nobody has been contacted. It’s a list of people you’re thinking about.

The Shortlist tab on a study, two people selected, with Send message and Remove from shortlist buttons

When you’re happy with the list, send the screener from here. Everyone gets their own personal link. Anyone on your do not contact list or who has a bouncing email address is skipped.

Candidates is where people go when they complete the screener and we capture their answers. Review their answers and see if they’re right for the study.

The Candidates tab showing a candidate's screener answers as columns

Participants is everyone who qualified, ready to do research.

If you’ve been doing it the old way. Adding people from your panel straight into Participants and then sending them a screener still works. Their answers are saved to their profile, but because they’re already past the candidate stage they never appear in the Candidates tab, so there’s no one place to review everyone. Start on the Shortlist tab instead. Same people, same screener, and you can see who said what before you decide.

Review answers next to panel data

We’ve made two enhancements to the Candidates area.

You can filter by what people said. Pick a screener question, pick the answer you’re after, and the list narrows to the people who match. You can filter by date too.

The filter builder on the Candidates tab, with screener questions listed as properties to filter by

And if someone came from a panel, you can see their panel data alongside. Open View settings and switch on any panel field as a column. It’s off by default and it remembers your choice.

The View settings column chooser on the Candidates tab, listing panel fields that can be switched on as columns

Move them on, or keep them in reserve

When you’ve found the people you want, select them and move them to Participants.

The move dialog for a candidate, offering Move to participants or another study in the project

If you’ve got more good fits than you have bandwidth for, move them to another study in the project instead. They sit there as candidates, answers intact, until you’re ready.

There’s a help article that walks through the whole thing: Shortlisting and screening people from your panel.

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