How recruitment works
There are two ways to bring people into your study: hire from a third-party panel, or bring your own. Both add participants to the same participant table.
Recruit is the tab where you decide who's in your study. Whether participants come from a paid panel or your own list, they all appear in the same place: the Participants table.
The two paths
Hire from a panel
Strella integrates with two participant panels. You place an order through Strella, specify your audience, and the panel sends you qualified participants. Strella handles payouts.
Use when you don't already have access to your target audience.
Bring your own
You generate a share link in Strella and send it out yourself to people you already know. They click in, take your screener, and (if they qualify) are invited to take the call.
Use when you already have a list: customers, prospects, employees, a partner audience.
How they connect
Every participant, whether from a panel or BYO, goes through the same pipeline:
- Lands on the screener. They answer your screener questions.
- Qualifies or doesn't. Based on screener answers and quotas.
- Invited to the interview. Invite them from the Qualified tab (or let auto-invite do it) and they get a link to join.
- Takes the interview. They click the link and the AI moderator runs them through your guide. There's no slot to book. In a human moderated study they book a time from your availability instead; see Schedule moderated interviews.
- Shows up in Results. Recording, transcript, themes.
You'll see all participants, regardless of how they got here, in Recruit → Participants, with tabs for Qualified, Invited, Completed, and Disqualified.
The Recruit sub-tabs
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Scheduling | Human moderated studies only: the availability participants book from. |
| Audiences | Your panel orders and share links: status, how many have completed, and drafts you haven't finished. Start new ones here. |
| Participants | Every individual, across all panels and share links. Invite, disqualify, send reminders, pay. |
| Screener | Only if you use the classic builder, and never on human moderated studies: the screener editor. In the new builder you edit the screener in Build. |
| Quotas | Quotas you've defined for this study and how full each one is. |
When it's turned on for your organization, the ⋮ menu beside the tabs opens the Recruitment funnel: stage-by-stage conversion from clicking the link, to completing the screener, to completing the interview.
Things to know
- You can mix both paths. A study can pull half its sample from a panel and the other half from your own list.
- Screener and quotas apply to both. They're study-wide, not per-source.
- Panel orders have lead time. Hiring from a panel takes hours to days depending on demand. BYO is instant, as soon as you share the link.