Recruiting

Once you launch your study, start a recruitment round from the Recruitment tab. Humanize takes care of everything else — recruiting, scheduling, handling no-shows, and running sessions. You only pay for participants who complete a session.

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Recruiting participants

Two ways to get people into your study:

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Our panels

Humanize gives you access to over 5 million participants across both general population and professional audiences. Set your target, specify how many people you need, and launch. For a focus group, your target names at least one country. Participants are sourced, screened, and scheduled automatically. General population — fully self-serve. Launch directly from Humanize. Premium & professionals — need decision-makers, developers, healthcare workers, or other professional audiences? Email us and we’ll set up a recruitment plan for you. More on premium and professional recruiting.

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Bring your own

Have your own list? Launch your study’s unique participant link from the Recruitment tab, then share it via email, Slack, wherever. Participants click the link, fill out your screener, pass quality checks, and get scheduled.

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Recruiting in rounds

You can recruit in batches. Start with a small pilot round (3–5 participants) to test your screener and guide before going full scale. Add more rounds as you need them.

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Audience countries

Every focus group needs at least one audience country before a round can launch, whichever way you recruit. Humanize uses the countries to suggest session times that suit your participants’ local hours. Interviews and surveys don’t need one.

• Our panels: pick at least one country in the panel’s targeting. A U.S. state or U.S. area filter counts as the United States. A Canadian province filter counts as Canada.
• Bring your own: open the panel’s Modify dialog on the Recruitment tab and add its audience countries.
• Premium panels: our team sets the countries when we build your recruitment plan.

Until a panel names a country, its Launch or Resume stays off and says what to add. When you launch a focus group on our panels from the AI Study Builder, Quick review asks for a country too. A bring-your-own panel gets its countries in Modify after you publish. One of our panels that already launched without a country can still add one. While it’s paused, open Modify and pick a country. Targeting is otherwise locked after launch, so a country is the only change it accepts. A panel that’s still recruiting keeps running. It needs a country before it can resume after a pause.

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Launching a panel

Each launch form checks its fields before Launch turns on. A problem shows under the field that fixes it, once you leave that field.

• Sample size: a whole multiple of the group size. A panel that already recruited people can’t drop below that count. A panel recruits at most 10,000 participants, or 500 for a premium panel.
• Credits: the form shows the cost and the balance you’d have left. When the balance falls short, Launch stays off and Purchase credits opens billing. The form hides the cost while its sample size can’t launch.

If your credit balance fails to load, the form says so in place of the cost. Reload the page and try again. A round always runs the study’s last published version. If you edited the study since then, Launch and Resume warn you first. Review and publish opens the builder to publish them. If you launch without publishing, the round recruits for the published version.

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Scheduling

When you launch a focus group round, you pick the session date and time. Slots cover all 24 hours in 15-minute steps. The date and slots default to the first audience country’s main time zone, or your own if no country resolves. You can choose another time zone beside the date. It also shows the credit cost and your remaining balance before you confirm. Interview and survey rounds start as soon as you launch them. Every focus-group panel needs an audience country before a new round. Add countries in Modify or the panel builder. The panel then suggests start times that keep every country you picked between 10 AM and 8 PM local time. A panel filtered to U.S. states or Canadian provinces uses only their time zones. A panel in New York can then start at 10 AM Eastern. Suggested slots show the selected time zone’s time. Your local date and time appear in the selection summary when the clocks differ. Countries with no shared hour, such as the United States and Australia, belong in separate panels. When a panel has countries, the launch dialog highlights the slots inside that window. Each slot shows one time in the selected zone. After you pick a slot, the summary shows your own local date and time when the clocks differ. Changing zones keeps the same scheduled instant. You can still pick any future slot. The helper text explains that highlighted times fall within 10 AM to 8 PM where your participants live. The round keeps the time zone you launched it in. Participants see that zone in the study listing and in their messages. The recruitment page shows session times in your own time zone. When a round’s zone keeps a different clock, the page also shows the session in that zone.

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Controlling the mix

Quotas let you recruit specific proportions — half iPhone users and half Android, say — instead of just whoever qualifies first. More on segments and quotas.

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Participant quality

Humanize screens for fraud and low-effort participation at three points: when someone applies, before they sign up, and after the session ends. Applicants who trip a check are flagged on the Recruitment tab with the reason. The Applicants list on the Recruitment tab shows everyone who applied, except people who finished a session or left one partway through. That includes people who joined a session that’s still running, and people who were turned away. Their status reads Joined, Never connected (they didn’t join in time), Rejected (our team removed them on quality grounds), or Turned away (for example, their round filled). If a session doesn’t meet our quality bar, we re-run it at no additional cost. More on participant quality.