Trial Secret Weapons: The Recruitment Company

Why Working with Recruitment Companies Could Be Your Trial’s Secret Weapon

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There came a point a few years ago where we sat at the interface of tech availability, convenience and a post-COVID-19 aftermath which changed the trial participation space indefinitely. Participants began to question whether they needed to 'do as much' as part of a trial when they didn't have to. Sponsors have responded and so has the push of decentralised and hubrid trials, enabling more accessibility to research. In conversations with our collaborators, colleagues and partners, there's bee a stark shift in local recruitment targets and goals, meaning that local recruitment at sites doesn't necessarily always win.

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Engaging with recruitment companies who already have a rich pool of engaged and willing participants has shown to be incredibly beneficial in getting trials up-and-running and enabling high retention and high compliance studies to occur.

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The Power of a Warm Start

When you work with a specialist recruitment company, you’re tapping into a ready-made pool of people who have already raised their hands. These aren’t random individuals reached via broad ads or organic traffic. They’re people who’ve either previously taken part in research or have actively signed up to be contacted about future studies. This alone can make a huge difference in your trial success.

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When participants have undertaken pre-screening and are highly engaged and motiviated, a number of benefits become clear immediately:

• Target enrollment can be achieved very quickly
• Pre-screeners have often been undertaken already
• A sense of ease knowing that your pool or participants regularly complete studies

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Engagement That Actually Sticks

Remote participation brings new challenges, the biggest of these being: “How do I keep people involved when I never see them in person?”. Working closely with groups in this space we hear this a lot.

This is where recruitment partners shine. Many of them don’t just find participants; they nurture them. They run check-ins, offer incentives, troubleshoot tech issues and build real rapport with participants. That kind of support translates to lower dropout rates, higher data quality and a smoother experience for everyone involved.

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The “Back Office” You Didn’t Know You Needed

Many recruitment firms also offer operational services. This could cover a wide variety of services which direclty benefit your trial -from handling consent calls, performing pre-screening interviews or shipping welcome kits (even biological sampling kits). Recruitment companies can be an extension of your study team.

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If you're a company with a solid tech foundation, you might also benefit from API connectivity. Some companies offer the potential to integrate directly into their pool of participants through API connection. This means that you can always be up-to-date on who is available to take part in a given study and even potentially plug some expression of interest forms into theit platform. The result of this means that sponsors can instantly get a feel for the availability of (and potentially speed of study setup) of their project given their inclusion adn exclusion criteria.

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If you’re running a highly localized trial or working with a site that has an excellent in-house recruitment team, you may not need external support.

But if you’re:

• running a virtual or hybrid study,
• enrolling niche populations,
• expanding into new regions, or
• under pressure to meet enrollment milestones quickly,

... then a recruitment partner can be the difference between a stressful scramble and a smooth launch.

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