Recruiting
Last Updated: November 19, 2025
If you need to recruit Veterans, service members, caregivers, or dependents for a remote moderated study, Perigean can help with that. Recruiting for remote moderated sessions will take one week after your study is approved in the Research Review touchpoint. Some studies might take longer to find participants if you are looking for a niche population.
If you need to recruit VA staff, internal teams, or audiences not identified above, OCTO does not have a contract for that. Work with your stakeholders and product leads to identify and recruit these audiences.
Services offered by Perigean
Perigean is available to assist you with the following services:
Scheduling
Provide Perigean with times that are good for you and your team, and they'll schedule the sessions. A general rule of thumb is to provide 2x available time slots for the number of research sessions you desire. To ensure you get the number of participants you’re looking for, state your desired number and ask for ~25% more people than you need. This buffer will help account for no-shows. If the no-show rate is higher than expected, Perigean will continue to recruit and schedule until your desired number is reached. Sometimes, your study may need to be extended by a day or two to accommodate.
Note-taking
Perigean can take notes for your studies. Please indicate in your research plan if you need assistance with notes. This should be a fallback to having members of your team take notes.
You'll need to provide your conversation guide when you request research to have notes taken.
Perigean will send the notes via Slack. The lead researcher must collect the notes, conduct synthesis, and strip out ALL personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) before posting to GitHub or sharing.
Remote meeting tool
For your remote research sessions, you will use Perigean's Zoom account, not your own, and they will provide the login details. We recommend using this account for your pilot session so you are familiar with logging into Perigean's account, practicing handoffs, and practicing your conversation guide.
Learn more about Perigean’s recruiting process.
Recruiting for mobile studies
Ask Perigean to recruit people who visit VA.gov using a mobile device (specify if tablets are acceptable for your study). You can refer to these successful screener questions that might apply to your study.
If you're using the screen-sharing method:
Ask Perigean to walk the participants through:
Downloading the Zoom mobile app before entering the session
Enabling settings for screen sharing on their device
If you're using the laptop-hugging method:
Ask Perigean to recruit people who can use a laptop, tablet with a stand, or a webcam
Make sure Perigean recruits people who are comfortable using their laptop/tablet camera or webcam
Ask Perigean to have the participants:
Do a dry run of the laptop-hugging method
Send an illustration, photo, or step-by-step instructions on how the laptop hugging works.
Inclusive recruiting
We want to make sure all users are represented in our research, and so we try to recruit a diverse sample that includes people from underserved groups. The VA Recruitment Checker is a tool that can help us do that:
When planning your study, use it to figure out how many people from various categories you should try to recruit. Enter the total number of people you plan to recruit, and the tool suggests target numbers for the recruitment criteria in your research plan.
After your study, use it to tally and share how many participants you talked to in each of the underserved groups. Take a screenshot of the resulting table and use Github Copilot to generate an accessible version for your research findings report.
Recruiting from underserved populations and reporting on which groups our research did and didn’t include helps us understand who our research findings apply to and who we should conduct research with next. For example, if we didn't talk to any Assistive Tech (AT) users, we can't be confident that our research findings will apply to them and so should aim to include them in the next round of research.
For more information and background on underserved groups of Veterans, see Maximum Variation Sampling. You can also learn more about other inclusive research strategies.
Referrals for research
If you meet a Veteran, caregiver, service member, or dependent who would be interested in participating in research, refer them to https://veteranusability.us/ .
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.