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Every study has a participant link. Share it directly, or add sources when different recruitment providers need their own language, tracking, or redirects. A source can define:
  • the interview language, chosen from the languages active on the study or left as Any language;
  • where completed, screened-out, quota-full, or failed-quality participants go;
  • the participant identifier supplied by the recruitment source;
  • how many participants it is meant to deliver;
  • optional email collection and custom link parameters.
These settings keep outcomes traceable without creating separate copies of the study. Editors can open Recruitment from the study navigation on any study. It opens on completed interviews against the target and, once fieldwork runs, the day the target lands at the recent pace. Needs you lists what the study needs from you now, most urgent first: interviews a panel is about to pay on its own, a panel that sends people without their identifier, whose people fail the screener (with the questions they fail on and the full groups they reach, when Verso can tell), rejects far more often than the others or has gone quiet for two days, the full quotas a panel may still be sending people into, a panel round Verso runs that the quotas keep turning people away from, a source at its target, the payment list to send. Each line’s main button opens the place where you act, or, for a message you send yourself, a draft written from your study’s settings and results to edit, copy and mark as sent. A line about participants who arrived without their identifier opens their interview, so you can tell a panel testing its link from a real gap, and adds a Draft message button beside it. Dismissing a line hides it for the whole team until it gets worse; a panel about to pay on its own cannot be dismissed. Sources lists every source the study receives participants from, including participants who opened the study link without a panel, shown as No panel, in a table: who started, who the screener turned away, completed interviews, those still to review, progress against the target and, for a source shared by link, a button copying its start link. Under each name, a status line says what is wrong with the source or what was last done about it, such as when its link was sent and by whom. Respondent rounds in several languages sit under one line adding them up. Click a column header to sort by it; sorting by target ranks sources by progress, with those without a target last. The same section splits completed interviews by a profile question or the interview language: crossed with the sources, either way round, or on its own, each value against its quota. Click a source to open its setup in a side panel, where an info icon explains each field and a warning shows when the source neither passes a participant ID nor collects email; the panel shows a save bar once you change something, and asks before you leave unsaved changes. Below the setup sit the messages Verso drafted for that source, to copy and mark as sent. The Add a source menu opens that panel blank through Panel by link or preset: Terac and Rakuten with their participant ID parameter and redirects already filled in, Avenir Focus with email collection on. Rakuten adds its project and participant IDs to the link it sends, and the redirects hand them back, so there is nothing to fill in. Adding the same panel twice gives each its own start link. A source’s menu opens View related interviews, the Interviews page filtered to that source, exports its roster, closes or reopens it, or deletes it. A closed source turns newcomers away through its quota-full redirect. No panel counts participants who came without a panel link, so nobody knows where they came from: it has no status and no link to share. To share the study with people you recruit yourself, add a source for them instead. Clicking No panel opens the study’s default redirects, which a source uses when its corresponding redirect is empty. Links already handed out keep working after a deletion, and those participants fall back to the same defaults. Quotas lists every quota against its own target on the page. Rejected interviews kept visible remain in those counts, and the section says how many; hide one to remove it. If Respondent recruitment is enabled for your organization, Respondent appears as a source of its own, one per interview language: a study run in several languages recruits each of them in its own round, and the rounds can run at the same time. Add a source offers Respondent for the study’s language and each language active on the study that has no Respondent source yet, naming the language once the study runs several. Each round’s row opens its own page, which names its language whenever the study runs several: the audience and estimate before publishing, then the live project, its applicants and the participant inbox. A draft whose language is later deactivated on the study keeps its page but cannot be saved until that language is active again. Verso publishes the round, which commits the funds and supplies source-level redirects that return participants whom screening or a full quota turns away to Respondent. Those source values take precedence over the study’s default redirects. If Prolific recruitment is enabled for your organization, Add a source offers Prolific the same way, one round per interview language. Prolific has no screener of its own: filters on what participants declared in their Prolific profile (an age range, a country of residence, and any other filter Prolific offers) decide who can see the study, so the round’s page picks filters instead of showing a panel screener, and your interview asks every criterion a filter cannot express. The incentive is set to the cent and must meet Prolific’s minimum of $8 an hour for the interview length, which the page names until it is met. A participant the interview turns away, screened out or over a quota, is paid a screen-out reward ($0.14 by default) from a screen-out budget (three per participant by default) that is prepaid and refunded unused; the cost estimate includes it. Verso publishes the round; its live page links to the Prolific study, offers refresh, pause and close, and carries an inbox to message the round’s participants, where a conversation is listed once the participant has written, until 30 days after their last message. Past rounds stays below the current round and shows each closed round of that panel in that language with its dates, targeting, target, estimate, and screened-in, completed, paid, and rejected totals. When no round is open in that language, Restore as draft copies a past round’s targeting, incentive, duration, target, title, and description into a fresh draft. Its old deadline, estimate, publication state, and project are not reused; estimate it again when the draft is ready, and Verso publishes it. Panel screener on that page is the screener Respondent will apply, built from the screening questions in your interview guide. Read it before the round is published: it gives each question in the order the panel asks it, what every option does (qualifies, disqualifies, or counts as neither), and the questions asked only to record an answer. A chip on the affected question names any quota or screening rule Respondent cannot fully apply. Questions that stay in the interview show their option verdicts in one line, or state that they carry no quota and cannot disqualify anyone. The questions Respondent does ask are not asked again: a participant arrives with those answers, which count towards your quotas and profile like any other (Screener and quotas). If the screener cannot be published, the page explains why until you fix the guide; audience and cost estimation stays available. The screener is not editable: change the interview guide and it follows. Refresh and Pause sit in the top bar there; refreshing pulls the latest project and participant states, including task completions. That page reads the round in one line, each figure labelled with whose it is: Respondent screened in and paid, Verso opened the link, approved, pending review and rejected. Underneath, the applicants table gives each person as Respondent holds them, with Respondent status (recruitment and payment), their Qualification, their Interview progress in Verso and the Settlement the panel was told. Dates show invitations, interview starts and completions, payments and settlements. Clicking a row with an available interview opens the shared reader with that interview’s recording and available synthesis beside the table; rows without an identified interview are not clickable. The panel’s own identifier under each name copies on click. Qualification shows Screening during an external screener and Not qualified when the panel holds a false qualification. Pending identity verification remains an ordinary pending state. An applicant Verso screens out or turns away because a quota is full reads Released, names the interview outcome, shows its terminal interview time once and has nothing to settle. No decision is taken on that page. You decide who is paid in Interviews, the same way you do on a study recruited from anywhere else: approving releases the incentive on Respondent and rejecting withholds it. Neither can be undone once Respondent has heard it. Applicants Respondent invited who never opened the study link still hold a recruiting slot, so the round says how many are outstanding, and each needs clearing with No-show before Verso can close the project. Export roster, in the menu of a source recruited by link, downloads a CSV that lists everyone the source sent, finished or not, with the panel’s own participant identifier when the study link carries one (a link with only ?panel= leaves it blank), where each interview stands, the decision and the reason behind each rejection on a completed one, how many seconds of recording each participant gave, and a link to the interview in Verso. It is what you send the recruiter to chase the participants who stopped and to be invoiced against. An admin’s file also has a column for each parameter the panel added to the study link and, when the panel asks for it, the participant’s email. Participants with no panel owe no incentive, so reviewing those interviews is curation only. Set an overall completion target to stop new starts when the required number of completed interviews is reached. Participants already in progress can finish. Quotas can manage the mix within that total, and any minimum quota needs the target to be set. Stay on budget also counts interviews in progress towards it, as long as they saw activity in the last 15 minutes (Screener and quotas). Before sharing any link, open it in a private browser window and complete each important outcome. Confirm that participant identifiers arrive correctly and that every redirect returns to the intended destination.

Screener and quotas

Define who qualifies and how the sample is balanced.