Why specialist samples stall
Most recruitment infrastructure is built for the general public. Ask a consumer panel for twenty public health policy managers working in government bodies, NGOs and think tanks, and you will get people who selected "healthcare" from a dropdown. The occupation data underneath is usually a broad classification in which a policy lead, a GP and an accountant are all filed as "professional".
So teams fall back on LinkedIn outreach, personal networks and snowballing from a couple of contacts. That works, slowly, and it quietly biases the sample towards whoever happens to be in someone's second-degree network. Meanwhile the fieldwork window closes.
We hold the professional detail up front. Members tell us their field, role, job title, organisation type, seniority and years in post when they join, so a brief written in your own language can be screened against real people rather than approximated.
Who we can recruit
Four groups, each screenable down to individual role and organisation type
Public health & health policy
Policy officers and managers, programme managers, heads of policy, consultants in public health, health improvement leads, and the communications side: public health comms, engagement, digital comms, behaviour change and stakeholder engagement managers. In government bodies, charities and NGOs, and think tanks.
Clinical & health professions
GPs, hospital consultants, resident doctors, nurses and specialist nurses, midwives, pharmacists, allied health professionals, dentists, paramedics, mental health professionals, practice managers and clinical research staff. Professional registration captured where it applies.
NHS leadership & governance
Trust board members and non-executive directors, governors, ICB and system leads, PCN and primary care leads, transformation and service improvement leads, quality and safety leads, patient experience leads, commissioning managers, and digital or informatics roles.
Wider public sector, social care & VCSE
Local authority officers and managers, social workers and social care managers, teachers and education leaders, housing association staff, charity and VCSE programme and policy leads, and regulators and inspectors.
What teams recruit them for
Usually one focused conversation, not an ongoing commitment
Expert review and sense-checking
A practitioner reads your draft findings or proposed intervention and tells you whether it survives contact with reality. A typical shape is fifteen minutes of preparation plus a forty to sixty minute interview, with the prep time inside the fee.
In-depth interviews
One-to-one, usually by video, about how a service, pathway or policy actually works day to day, rather than how the process map says it does.
Implementation and policy feedback
The questions that decide whether an intervention gets adopted: what would block this, what would need to be true for our organisation to take it on, who else has to agree.
Advisory panels
A small standing group convened to advise across a programme, with recruitment, scheduling and honoraria handled so your team can concentrate on the content.
Professional and clinical validation
Testing whether a product, tool or piece of guidance is safe, usable and credible to the professionals expected to use it, alongside or after patient-facing work.
Professional surveys
Quantitative work with a niche professional audience, where fifty to a hundred responses from the right people beats a thousand from the wrong ones.
How it works
Feasibility first, so you find out whether the sample exists before you commit budget
Send the brief as you have it
Job titles, sectors, organisation types, seniority, sample size, and your fieldwork window. No need to translate it into our categories; that is our job.
Feasibility check
We map your criteria onto the panel's professional fields and come back with a straight answer: whether we already hold members matching your brief, or will source them for your study, and what the realistic timeline is for each. If a criterion cannot be screened reliably, or the numbers are not there, you hear it now rather than three weeks in.
Recruit and screen
We invite the matching members, run any additional screener you need, confirm role and organisation, and hold a reserve list against drop-out.
Schedule and hand over
Confirmed participants, scheduled into your calendar with reminders sent, and their fees administered by us. From here you moderate, or we do.
Typical time to field is four to six weeks from a signed brief, confirmed at the feasibility stage, and faster where we already hold the sample. Tighter turnarounds are sometimes possible and are priced accordingly.
Why the sample stands up to scrutiny
The governance that protects participants is also what makes the data defensible
They speak personally, and say so
Participants take part in a personal capacity and in their own time, giving their own professional view. They are never presented as speaking for their employer, which is precisely what makes the findings quotable without a governance problem later.
Interests are declarable
Many public sector bodies require staff to declare outside interests. Every participant gets a written summary of the study, the fee and what was asked, so declaring it is straightforward. Nobody is put in an awkward position by taking part in your research.
Nothing confidential is requested
No patient-identifiable information, no commercially sensitive material, no unpublished internal documents. Discussion guides are reviewed on that basis, and moderators do not press when a participant says they cannot discuss something.
Employers are never contacted
Not to verify a role, not to seek permission. We also never pass a participant's name to a client without asking them first, so your study cannot create an employment problem for someone who helped you.
Not career respondents
These are working practitioners recruited for the job they currently do. Most hear from us a handful of times a year, so you are not interviewing someone who has rehearsed the same opinions across a dozen studies this quarter.
Paid at professional rates
£75 to £150 an hour by seniority for non-clinical roles, and £100 to £350 for clinicians in line with fair market value practice. Paid by bank transfer, with preparation time inside the fee. Underpaying this audience does not save money; it changes who agrees to take part.
Professional recruitment pricing
Buy the sample on its own, or the whole study. Priced separately so you only pay for the part you need.
Sample only
Recruitment
£1,500 project setup plus £250 per participant recruited, plus the participants' own fees. A six-person expert review is £3,000; twenty participants is £6,500. We find, screen, schedule and pay them. You run your own fieldwork.
- Feasibility check before you commit
- Screening on field, role, organisation and seniority
- Your own screener questions applied
- Scheduling into your calendar, with reminders
- Participant fees administered and paid
- Reserve list held against drop-out
Recruit & moderate
Specialist Interviews
We recruit and run the sessions. For teams who need the expertise in the room but do not have the capacity, or the sector knowledge, to moderate it themselves.
- Everything in recruitment, for 8 to 12 participants
- Discussion guide developed with you
- Moderated interviews or expert review sessions
- Recordings and full transcripts
- Topline findings with verbatims
- Participant fees included
End to end
Full Specialist Study
Design, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis and reporting for a specialist audience, or an ongoing professional advisory panel across a programme.
- Research design and sampling strategy
- Larger or multi-phase samples
- Mixed professional and public samples
- Full thematic analysis and written report
- Advisory panel setup and ongoing facilitation
- Stakeholder presentation
How recruitment is priced: £1,500 per project to set up the screener, sourcing strategy and verification, plus £250 for each participant recruited. The setup is the same work whether you need six people or twenty, which is why it sits separately rather than being buried in a per-head rate. Six participants is £3,000; twenty is £6,500.
All recruitment includes: A feasibility check before you commit, screening against professional field, role, organisation type and seniority, any additional screener questions you supply, scheduling and reminders, participant fees administered and paid, and a reserve list held against drop-out.
Participant fees — non-clinical: Passed through at cost, on top of the recruitment fee. £75 per hour at officer and practitioner level, £100 at manager and senior specialist level, and £150 at head of, director and board level. Applies to public health and policy, NHS leadership and governance, and the wider public sector, social care and VCSE.
Participant fees — clinical: Set to fair market value practice, which runs well above public sector rates. £100 to £175 per hour for nurses, midwives, allied health professionals, pharmacists and paramedics; £200 to £350 for GPs, hospital consultants and dentists. Budgeting a clinician at public sector rates is the most common reason a specialist sample fails to fill.
How fees are paid: Preparation time is paid inside the session fee. Written reviews are £40 to £150 and professional surveys £15 to £60, depending on group. Paid by bank transfer, because retail vouchers are not appropriate for most NHS and public sector staff.
What adds cost: Very narrow briefs (a single named role in a single organisation type), turnarounds under two weeks, in-person sessions, samples requiring professional registration checks, and clinical or board-level recruits, which take longer to source as well as costing more to pay. We tell you at feasibility, not at invoice.
Procurement: We work with statements of work, framework agreements and purchase orders, and invoice on your terms. Liability insurance in place. UK-based, ICO registered and GDPR compliant, and happy to complete supplier onboarding and data protection paperwork for NHS and university buyers.
Who uses professional recruitment
Mostly teams who already have the study designed and need the right people in it
Common questions
The things buyers ask before sending a brief
What kinds of professionals can you recruit?
Public health and health policy roles, including policy officers and managers, heads of policy, public health consultants, and public health communications, engagement and behaviour change leads. Clinical and health professions, including GPs, hospital consultants, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, allied health professionals, dentists and paramedics. NHS leadership and governance, including board members, non-executive directors, governors, ICB and PCN leads, transformation, quality and patient experience leads, and commissioning managers. And the wider public sector, social care and VCSE, including local authority officers, social workers, education leaders, housing association staff, charity policy and programme leads, and regulators.
Do you run the sessions, or do we?
Either. Most agencies and university teams come to us for recruitment only: we find, screen, schedule and pay the participants, and you moderate. If you would rather we ran the fieldwork as well, we moderate, transcribe and analyse. Both are priced separately so you only buy the part you need.
How much does professional participant recruitment cost?
Recruitment only is £1,500 per project to set up, plus £250 for each participant recruited, so six participants is £3,000 and twenty is £6,500. Participant fees are charged on top at cost. For non-clinical roles those are £75 per hour at officer and practitioner level, £100 at manager and senior specialist level, and £150 at head of, director and board level. Clinical fees are higher, in line with fair market value practice: £100 to £175 per hour for nurses, midwives, allied health professionals, pharmacists and paramedics, and £200 to £350 for GPs, hospital consultants and dentists. Recruitment with moderated fieldwork starts at £9,500, and a full specialist study starts at £16,000.
How long does it take to field a specialist sample?
Typically four to six weeks from a signed brief, and faster where we already hold the sample. The feasibility stage tells you which of those you are getting before you commit: whether we already hold members matching your brief, or will source them for your study. Either way you get a straight yes or no and a date, rather than us accepting the job and discovering the problem halfway through fieldwork.
How big is the panel?
We do not publish a headline panel size, because for specialist work it is a misleading number: a panel of fifty thousand people tells you nothing about whether it holds eleven public health policy managers in NGOs. What matters is how many match your brief, which is exactly what the feasibility check answers, before you commit anything. Where we do not already hold enough of the right people, we source them for your study and say so up front.
How do you know participants are who they say they are?
Members give us their professional field, role, job title, organisation type, seniority, years in the field and any professional registration when they join, and that structured profile is what we screen your brief against. We re-confirm role and organisation at invitation, and can add a bespoke screener for a specific brief. Where a study requires it, we can also verify against a work email address.
Can we supply our own screener?
Yes. Send us your screening criteria in whatever form you have them and we will map them onto the panel's professional fields, then tell you how many members qualify before you commit. If a criterion cannot be screened reliably, we will say so rather than guess.
Are these professional research respondents?
No, and that is the point. These are working practitioners recruited for their current professional role, not career panel respondents who take part in studies for a living. Most members hear from us a handful of times a year, when a study genuinely matches their background.
Do you work with our procurement process?
Yes. We work with statements of work, framework agreements and purchase orders, and invoice on your terms. Liability insurance is in place, we are UK-based, ICO registered and GDPR compliant, and we can complete supplier onboarding and data protection paperwork for NHS and university buyers.
