The First Book on Recruiting Respondents The History of Niche Creation The Ads Experience

CHAPTER 1. VOCATION

EDUCATION – THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS YOURSELF

In 2012, I turned 20 and enrolled as a part-time student in the Department of Organisational Management at the Academy of Social Management. Subsequently, I became the head of my group.

My studies laid a solid foundation for my further self-fulfilment and revealed qualities I never knew existed. I became more serious, I wanted to be better than myself, to excel, to have good grades in all subjects. I stopped being indifferent to bad grades and rganizeg my success in even difficult maths programmes. When I became the student leader, I tried to solve difficult situations for the benefit of the students. This encouraged me to take responsibility for my words and decisions. I learned to think not only for myself, but also for the students who depended on me, and to be more aware of people and their motivations. There is much talk today that the classical education system is outdated and has little relevance to the modern world. My experience says otherwise. Higher education is the school of life, which teaches you to think on a large scale, holistically and systematically, gives you a broad outlook, develops independence and patience. Not everyone reaches the finish line and gets the cherished qualification, some do not have the patience to overcome all obstacles. And to pass an exam or a test, you need to be able to communicate, articulate your thoughts and present yourself in the best way to achieve the cherished goal. I was lucky: my studies were directly related to my field of work. I wrote my internship and diploma in my own startup, and the knowledge I gained at the Academy helped me in running my rganizeg.

When I first found out that I had won a free place at the Academy, I already had money set aside for the first semester. Being accepted on a budget had a positive effect on my self-esteem. It confirmed my confidence that I was good enough to get higher education for free. At the same time I was actively looking for a job. I had recently been laid off from my job as head of telemarketing for a premium white goods company. I set up the department from scratch, recruited and trained the staff, but a new manager came in and I didn’t want to stick to his line of work in terms of introducing fines for staff (even today I find it unacceptable, fines are a relic of the past). As a consequence of our disagreement, I was asked to leave the company.

THE FREELANCE ROUTE

So, I was actively looking for a job and came across a survey website. What caught my attention was that you could give your opinion on a survey and get a cash reward. I signed up for the chip survey and went to it with my husband. The survey needed to gather the right number of participants, and one of the field managers (who later turned out to be an employee of Business Analytica, a company with a huge office near Kolomenskaya station) agreed to let my friends and acquaintances take part in the survey. True, I didn’t exactly bring people I knew. Instead, I placed an advertisement about the survey on the avito website, and, lo and behold, two people took part in the project, and I earned my first two hundred roubles! My joy was boundless. And today I am grateful to my local manager Elena Polyanskaya, one of the nicest women I have ever met, for being my guide to the world of research.

PRIMUM INTER PARES: FIRST AMONG EQUALS

After my first little experience, I didn’t sit still. I made a CV and started actively knocking on research doors. I was looking for marketing companies with which I could work as a freelancer. During my search, I came across an advert for a retailer with a large office near Novokuznetskaya station. It was the company DNS.

At that time, you still had to come to pick up the project in person. I went to DNS and was given materials for inviting respondents to the radio test, which I had to hand out in a busy place. Each participant had to be handed a paper ticket with an individual number. People who took the tickets called the company and signed up for the radio test by giving my name. An electronic version of these tickets was e-mailed to me. Then, in veiled form, I published my first survey on oprosmoskva.ru, giving my contacts. So I managed to get 40 people to take part – though only 16 did. Later, I learned from the manager that it is forbidden to post company projects in open sources, especially on third-party sites. At first I did not want to give up a valuable resource and continued to post information on survey sites for a while, but later I rganize that the quality of the survey suffered from this and gave up using them. Instead I came up with the first rganizeg of my business process: I merged everyone who had ever emailed me into one database. I exported this base into an e-mail survey invitations mailing list. I became a pathfinder; it was a new level of respondent selection for surveys.

After about six months of working on DNS projects, I became the number one recruiter, earning 80,000 roubles a month. True, the payments were once every three or four months, but that didn’t bother me. I was incredibly pleased with myself!

From day one, I strived to be the highest paid recruiter.  My ego was a constant worry, and I was constantly pestering the project managers to ask what my score was, each time rejoicing when I heard: the best! Working with DNS taught me a lot. I especially admired the work of the company’s managers. They communicated so calmly and politely, and looking at them made me want to be better. Thinking back to that time, I am filled with gratitude to my dear teachers for the school of life in research, and I would like to express it with a gesture of gratitude by sending them a basket of fruit or flowers and a note with warm words.

This company had the most interesting projects. For example, owners of certain car brands travelled to Germany for two days. The respondents had a focus group there. The participants received 10 thousand roubles remuneration and were paid for everything: tickets and excursions. I looked for respondents for this study, as well as for others, among other recruiters. The aim was to find as many participants as possible in a short period of time. I enjoyed recruiting and worked passionately during the day, in the evening, and sometimes at night. I finished my work towards midnight, continued in the morning and so on into the night. She often missed weekends, occasionally going to the countryside with her husband – late on a Friday night. It was my passion and desire to be the first one that led me to create the First Respondent Recruitment Agency.

CHAPTER 2. INDEPENDENCE

FROM IDEA TO AGENCY

In 2013, I was running around like a squirrel in a wheel, running 32 respondent recruitment projects in DNS and other companies at the same time.

It turned out this way. I was receiving feedback in the mail from people interested in participating in the research. These applications were falling into different inboxes, creating chaos, which led me to a new need to streamline business processes, namely to create a single questionnaire in Google Forms. When a potential participant filled in the questionnaire, I contacted them to clarify whether they were suitable for the study’s target audience. By automating respondent selection in this way, I was able to recruit more respondents and run several projects simultaneously, which was incredibly annoying for my competitors.

One day I got a phone call from a woman who was swearing and threatening that she was going to come after me at an unexpected place and I would have a hard time. She called for a while, but when she saw that her threats were not working, she started putting up advertisements with my phone number. She wrote in the ads that she needed respondents for a survey on, for example, hamburgers, promising a 3,500-ruble reward for their participation. There were so many people who took the bait that my phone was ringing off the hook day and night. I was insanely hurt and, worst of all, it was getting in the way of my work. And that was exactly what the rival was after. But despite such situations I continued to work, and step by step I moved towards my goal. Previous clients recommended me to new ones, and my client base expanded.

That was when I first thought about setting up my own business. One company was not profitable in paying for my services by card, and their representative remarked that everyone would benefit if I set up a sole proprietorship. I rganize that this was sound advice and that there was no other way out, we needed to get into a new round of development. But I did not feel that the right moment had arrived. I decided that it would be pointless to set up a sole proprietorship from scratch. First you have to do some preparatory work to position yourself for clients.

I started by putting together a website on the wix website builder and adding customer testimonials to it. I registered with My Business to get to grips with online bookkeeping. I actively added clients to my LinkedIn network and sent out commercial