Most research tools can find you a marketing manager. Very few can find you seventeen people who run claims automation at mid-market insurers and have switched vendors in the last year.
That second kind of audience is what custom recruitment is for, and on CleverX it's included as standard.
How recruitment works here
There are three routes to participants, and most studies use one or two:
Panel partnerships. For consumer and broad business audiences, we recruit through panel partnerships covering 8M+ people. Good when your criteria are demographic or role-level and you need volume quickly.
Custom recruitment. Our recruitment team sources participants specifically for your study. Included on every professional study by default, not an upgrade you buy, and the only way to reach audiences that don't exist on any panel.
Your own audience. Bring your customers or users and invite them with a link. Cheapest per response, because you're supplying the people.
What custom recruitment actually means
You write the brief. We go and find those people.
That means sourcing named individuals who match your criteria, verifying they genuinely are who they say they are, approaching them, and handling the back-and-forth until they're booked into your study. If someone drops out, we replace them.
You don't manage any of it. You get participants who match, and a study that fills.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The honest problem with panel-only research is that panels can only sell you who they already have. When your audience is narrow, one of three things happens:
You wait weeks for a fill that never completes.
You quietly loosen your criteria until the panel can match them, and end up interviewing people who aren't quite right.
You give up and ask your sales team for introductions.
All three are expensive, and the second is the most dangerous: because you still get data. It just isn't data about the people you meant to study.
Custom recruitment removes that trade-off. The criteria stay as tight as your question needs.
It's built into how you brief us
This isn't a service bolted onto the side of the product. When you describe your audience and type something our filters can't express, that value is kept separately and passed to the recruitment team as part of your brief, rather than being turned into a filter that would match nobody.
So a criterion we can't match on doesn't quietly shrink your study to zero. It becomes something a person goes and finds.
There's also a free-text notes field on every study for the things no filter captures.
What we need from you
The tighter your brief, the faster we move. Useful things to tell us:
The role, and what that role actually does day to day (titles vary wildly between companies).
Company profile: size, industry, region, and anything about their setup that matters.
Behaviour or experience: recently evaluated a vendor, uses a specific tool, went through a particular event. This is usually the part panels can't do.
Anyone you need excluded: competitors, existing customers, previous participants.
If you're not sure how tight to make it, start with what you'd tell a colleague. We'll come back with what's realistic.
Feasibility before you commit
Before a study goes live we'll tell you honestly whether your audience is findable, roughly how long it will take, and where the criteria are fighting each other. If something looks hard, you'll hear it from us early rather than discover it two weeks into fielding.
We would rather tell you a specification is difficult up front than take the study and underdeliver.
What it costs
Custom recruitment is included in your credit cost on every professional study. There is no separate recruitment fee and no minimum retainer.
Professional responses cost more credits per participant than consumer ones, and that difference is where the sourcing work sits. See Pricing and credits for the per-method rates.
Getting started
Set your audience when you build the study and describe who you need. On professional studies our recruitment team picks it up from there, and will come back to you with a view on feasibility.