Basic Recruiting Techniques

• Your best assets in the recruitment business are the recruited speakers themselves. Offer them additional incentives for every new recruited speaker (snow ball system) and they will go for it like starved squirrels for roasted peanuts. But to get a significant mass this takes some time. Therefore it is good to start early and do a lot of scheduling.
• If your speech corpus requires the same speaker to be recorded more than once, do not pay the incentive before the last recording session. Give feedback to speakers, especially if they are recorded via telephone lines, to keep them motivated. That way you'll minimize the number of incomplete recording sets.
• Some remarks about different advertising methods:
  • Newspaper, TV or radio ads:
    Not very effective and usually rather expensive.
  • News paper articles or small radio/TV stories about the collection:
    Very effective! The problem is to find somebody who is interested in the project and will do a story about it^6.6. Try the popular science sections.

    Great advantage of this method: you may select news papers or radio/TV stations based onyour desired speaker profiles. For instance if you're looking for young female speakers, you might contact young fashion magazines; if you're looking for speakers with a certain dialect, you might try a local radio station in that area.

  • Internet:
    Absolutely not effective. Informative Web pages about the project and Web forms (to register as a speaker) may be of help with the recruitment, but they are not sufficient to get to the speakers.
  • Associations / schools / colleges / clubs:
    If you have special speaker profiles to fulfill, use your imagination, a good search engine or the yellow pages to identify institutions for this particular group. For instance you might contact the local Association of Turkish Tennis Players, if you need native speakers of Turkish. Or contact the local high-schools and offer them a free tour through your lab and record them in small groups while the rest plays Tetris on your transcriber workstations.