As a Research Operations Manager in a fast-paced environment, I know how overwhelming manual recruitment processes can be.
Especially when it involves hard-to-reach, nuanced participants.
At Future Partners, a travel and tourism-focused creative insights firm, juggling multiple studies, organizing interviews, and maintaining high-quality data with tight deadlines is no small feat. The recruitment process, in particular, can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially when we're trying to engage both leisure travelers and travel industry professionals, where there's often a mix of diverse backgrounds, preferences, and schedules.
Launching a successful study involves many moving parts, and using the wrong tools means longer setup times and less focus on what matters. Plus, tracking recruitment efforts retroactively was a nightmare without a unified dashboard.
Feeling buried under your to-do list? Here’s my gift to you before the holidays as many of us are deep into 2025 planning, securing a budget for research initiatives is top of mind. I’ve been there—evaluating the current landscape of research tools and searching for a partner that enables research using the tools we already have, while centralizing the entire process from invites to incentives in one place. After exploring several options, our team chose Ethnio, and I’m happy to report that the right tools—like Ethnio—made a dramatic difference in scaling research operations.
Launching a successful study involves many moving parts, and using the wrong tools means longer setup times and less focus on what matters. Plus, tracking recruitment efforts retroactively was a nightmare without a unified dashboard.
Queeny Nalyanya Research Operations Manager, Future Partners
In this post, I’ll share how we transformed our recruitment efforts into a well-oiled, ROI-driving machine, enabling us to build a targeted, scalable participant panel. With tips for selecting tools that truly matter to your research impact.
The case for investing in the right tools
Managing research for clients in the travel industry—whether it's shaping strategies for hospitality leaders or streamlining operations for tourism brands—requires thoughtful planning, especially when recruiting at scale. Before Ethnio, managing recruitment was a chaotic and cumbersome process. As part of a team handling a high volume of studies—averaging 60 screeners a month in the fast-paced travel industry—we faced challenges that could slow down operations and cost us valuable time and resources
From manually tracking responses to communicating with participants through disconnected systems, there were constant gaps that caused delays and frustration.
Automation is the future, and I’m happy to report that the right tools—like Ethnio—can make a dramatic difference in scaling research operations. From screening and scheduling to compensating participants, Ethnio helps us maintain an inclusive, diverse, and compliant recruitment process while significantly improving speed and reducing errors.
Check out more on Future Partners’ full customer story.
How we went from days of recruitment to just 2-3 Hours
High-volume recruitment doesn’t have to mean sacrificing precision or quality. For example, imagine a hotel chain facing frequent customer support calls from users struggling to book rooms online. The call center costs are adding up, and a better booking experience could not only help users but also save the company money. A redesign of the booking process would increase conversions, reduce support calls, and enhance customer satisfaction.
This situation reflects the challenges we help our clients navigate at Future Partners. When travel brands need to enhance their visitor experience, boost booking conversions, or gain deeper insights into travelers’ preferences and pain points, we play a pivotal role in identifying the right participants to engage for impactful research. We ensure that we recruit the most relevant, nuanced participants, aligning them with the client's goals. Doing this at scale requires operational efficiency.
Here’s a quick glance of what my team needed support with:
Challenges in high-volume participant recruitment
Operational Challenges
Managing an average of 60+ screeners monthly.
Motivating participants to complete surveys.
Identifying and preventing fraudulent entries (e.g., fake locations or inaccurate data).
Maintaining an up-to-date participant panel segmented by qualifications and preferences.
Prior tooling limitations
Delays from manual processes.
Non-branded communications caused by fragmented tools.
Lack of real-time collaboration tools for team reviews.
Insufficient customer support for enterprise-level needs
Scaling thoughtfully vs chaotically
For a while, I used a patchwork of tools:
Excel for participant management
email to communicate
multiple apps to schedule interviews
a calendar to track it all
This meant constantly flipping between platforms, missing critical details, and wasting time simply keeping things organized. Not to mention the frustration of realizing that a candidate I just invited had already qualified out, or an email reminder wasn't sent out etc.
After evaluating several options, the team chose Ethnio as our User Research CRM. Ethnio streamlined how we handle participant management and recruitment—from crafting screeners to managing NDAs and disbursing incentives.
Now, instead of wasting time running between different tools and platforms, I handle everything—from sending invites to distributing incentives—within Ethnio. By centralizing and automating key steps, I’ve saved countless hours, improved participant quality, and built a program that adapts to high-volume demands without breaking down.
The team can monitor the entire recruitment funnel, including participant activity, study invites, completions, incentives, and contact status.Queeny NalyanyaResearch Operations Manager, Future Partners
Customizable study outreach and flexible screening options
The Problem:
Before Ethnio, recruitment was a multi-step process that could take days. I had to create screeners, send them to participants, manually track responses, and coordinate with the team to ensure we had the right people. If there was a tight deadline, I was often working extra hours to meet it.
The Solution with Ethnio:
With pre-built templates for screeners tailored to each project, I could simply open a template, tweak a few details, and send it out. Depending on the complexity, what previously took a day or two now takes just 2-3 hours. In urgent situations, we can complete recruitment in as little as 2 hours, which is crucial in the fast-paced travel industry where timing is everything.
Actionable Tip for Other ResOps Leaders:
Set up templates for the screeners you use most often to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
Real-time collaboration and faster team review
The Problem:
Managing recruitment often required a lot of back-and-forth. I’d send screeners for review, wait for feedback, and sometimes the process would get delayed when multiple stakeholders were involved in reviewing the participant list or screener questions.
The Solution with Ethnio:
With Ethnio, my team can collaborate in real-time. We now share screener setups, filter results, and review participant lists without sending email attachments or manually tracking changes. This collaboration has drastically reduced our review time. Now, when urgency is critical, we can push a project to the participant pool in less than 2 hours.
Actionable Tip for Other ResOps Leaders:
Take full advantage of collaborative features like live edits and instant feedback loops to keep things moving quickly and prevent delays.
Targeting the right candidates in a few clicks
The Problem:
Before Ethnio, filtering participants manually by qualification felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. Sorting by geography, job role, or experience level required painstaking manual work, and it was easy to make mistakes.
The Solution with Ethnio:
Advanced filtering capabilities have been a game changer. We can quickly identify the right participants using predefined criteria such as region, job role, or industry. With Ethnio, participants are automatically segmented based on the answers they provide, meaning I don’t have to manually sift through hundreds of responses.
Actionable Tip for Other ResOps Leaders:
Set up and save filters for frequent participant criteria so you can recruit the right candidates in minutes.
Through governance features like consent templates and cool-down periods, Ethnio empowers secure and compliant research. As a small team, Ethnio has reduced my anxiety.
A centralized command center for UXR
The Problem:
In the travel industry, we often face high volumes of research requests. Managing multiple studies simultaneously quickly becomes overwhelming. Recruiting for different projects using multiple platforms made it even more complex.
The Solution with Ethnio:
The centralized platform enabled us to manage multiple recruitment projects in parallel, without sacrificing quality. We can easily run several recruitment processes at once, ensuring the right participants are selected for each study. Now I can confidently send hundreds of emails without worrying if they’re being received correctly. This scalability has allowed us to handle twice as many studies.
Actionable Tip for Other ResOps Leaders:
Leverage Ethnio’s ability to support multiple users. This is particularly useful in fast-paced industries like travel, where demand can spike unexpectedly and we need more team members involved in research projects.
Improving data quality with guardrails
The Problem:
Maintaining high data quality has always been a challenge. I had to ensure we only included qualified participants, which often involved painstaking manual checks and attention to detail. This was both time-consuming and error-prone.
The Solution with Ethnio:
Ethnio’s quality control features automatically flag and exclude unqualified participants. If someone doesn’t meet a specific criterion—whether it’s location or job role—they’re automatically removed from the pool. Also, with IP guardrails, where participants would submit fake data, such as listing a city they didn’t live in or using a name that seemed inconsistent with their other information. For example, someone might say they live in New York but their IP address shows Miami, or provide two first names instead of a full name.
This has dramatically improved our data quality by ensuring that only the most relevant participants are included in our studies. As a result, we’re wasting less time and resources, and the insights we gather are more reliable.
Actionable Tip for Other ResOps Leaders:
Automate your qualification process as much as possible. The fewer manual checks required, the more reliable your data and the more time you’ll save.
If you’re looking to build participant panel of your dreams, here’s where to start:
Speed up your recruitment by creating and saving pre-built templates for common study needs.
Involve your team early on, and review documents together to avoid delays.
Set up advanced filters and tags for your most common study criteria, ensuring you recruit the best participants quickly.
Ethnio feels like an extension of our ops team. 
Queeny NalyanyaResearch Operations Manager, Future Partners
When I log in each morning, I can see where we are and what tasks need to be done to stay on track. Whether you’re running one study or managing multiple high-volume B2B projects, Ethnio provides the flexibility and automation necessary to optimize your research operations. By taking a measured approach with the right tools, you can build the B2B panel of your dreams—efficiently, at scale, and with a high level of confidence in your participant quality.
Final thoughts
With a true tooling partner, I’ve found that it’s possible to scale research operations seamlessly, even as demand increases. Investing in Ethnio was a game changer for us. We now handle recruitment processes that used to take days in just hours, and we’re able to scale our research efforts without compromising on quality or team productivity. With automation, customization, and real-time collaboration at our fingertips, we can run studies faster, make better decisions, and, most importantly, deliver valuable insights for our clients.