How Kantar recruits the right participants at speed

Ann Marie Blake's research career started on the other side of the glass. She took part in a study in college, heard the agency was hiring, and has been on both sides of the recruit ever since, which has left her with a clear view of what a study owes the person who agrees to sit in it.

"I have high standards," Blake says.

Now VP, Project Management, Qualitative, she leads the team at Kantar North America that brings studies to life: they plan the projects, manage recruitment, run fieldwork, coordinate vendors, hold the budget, and carry overall delivery. When some of the most trusted brands in the world have numbers that tell them what happened but not why, this is the practice they turn to. More than 600 researchers in over 60 countries, running everything from ethnography to online co-creation.

For Blake's team, a lot of that rides on a successful recruit.

"Often the challenge is not finding participants, but finding the right participants who truly match the research objectives and can speak authentically about the topic."

That's a higher bar than a quota. Clients come to Kantar for low-incidence audiences: niche professionals, category enthusiasts, decision-makers, hard-to-find B2B audiences, emerging technology users, and consumers with very particular behaviors or experiences.

The brands Kantar works with are the ones setting the pace. The experiences they create become the expectations everyone else gets measured against, and that work moves fast, often in several markets at once.

Kantar's newer methods are built for that. Alongside its traditional qualitative work, they also offer Kantar Converser, its AI-moderated one-on-one methodology, and Kantar Live, a rapid-turnaround format that puts up to 100 participants into a single expert-led session. These are approaches, as Blake puts it, where participant availability and speed are critical.

Both make the research faster. Neither helps if the right participants can't be found just as fast.

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Solution

The methods were new. The recruitment behind them had to be too.

Kantar needed a recruitment partner that could move with agility, according to Gina Henderson, Head of Qualitative, North America. They needed to find a partner that could recruit high quality participants at speed, without sacrificing the participant experience in return.

The requirement was narrow: meet Kantar's audience and screening criteria, at speed, across markets, and without adding operational complexity for a team already coordinating multiple vendors.

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Impact

In the first three months, Askable recruited more than 1,000 participants across five markets. Every one met the quality requirements set for their study.

"The Askable team has been responsive, collaborative, and willing to problem-solve alongside us when unusual recruitment requests arise," Blake says. "They're not just filling quotas. They're working with us to understand the research objective and find the best path forward. That level of engagement has made them easy to work with and has helped build trust quickly."

The clearest example came when Kantar ran one of its Kantar Live sessions in Mexico. The Askable team threw a watch party for it, Mexican takeout included.

"It really felt like we were an extension of the team," Blake says. "They were focused on our success because our success was their success. It wasn't just another project. I felt like I was the most important client."

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Looking ahead

"We've become more confident taking on projects with tighter timelines and more niche recruitment requirements," Blake says. "Having access to a scalable recruitment partner allows us to respond more quickly when clients need answers fast.”

"It's been a beautiful partnership," says Henderson. "They've changed our way of working and now we can offer a better service for our clients."

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