Participant recruitment is a foundational step in qualitative research operations, covering everything from defining a target profile and building a screener to sourcing candidates, verifying eligibility, and managing incentives. When recruitment is done well, the resulting sample reflects the real population a team needs to understand, whether that is a specific consumer segment, a product user group, or a regional demographic. Poor recruitment undermines even the most carefully designed discussion guide, because findings from the wrong participants cannot reliably inform strategy. In enterprise research, participant recruitment must also account for fraud prevention, panel quality, and the logistical complexity of running studies across multiple markets and languages simultaneously.