Recruiting 7 Utility Engineers for a Facility Ratings Software Study

The Brief 

A utility software company wanted to understand how transmission and power utility engineers experience facility ratings software in practice, with particular interest in how teams using competing platforms handled FAC-08 compliance workflows. The study called for 15 in-depth interviews with people who had hands-on familiarity with the tools they worked with daily, not just general knowledge of the market. 

What Made Recruitment Difficult 

Facility ratings is a niche discipline. The professionals who manage it sit within a specific band of the utility sector and work with software most recruiters have never encountered. Qualifying participants required confirming not just job title but the specific competing solution in active use, covering both established third-party platforms and internally-built systems. Alongside current end-users, the study also included former salespeople from competing companies who could speak to the commercial and technical side of the same tools. 

Participants also had to be capable of conducting genuinely technical conversations in English, which narrowed the eligible pool and made individual screening calls necessary rather than form-based filtering alone. 

Quota and Sourcing Design 

North America was the primary geography, with 12 to 15 interviews planned in the region before changing for an EMEA allocation. Company size varied across mid-market utilities serving up to a 100,000 customers and enterprise-scale operators with over one million. Sourcing drew on LinkedIn Boolean searches and professional networks within the NERC compliance and transmission operations communities, with each candidate individually screened for both role relevance and technical depth. 

• 7 experts sourced across North America  
• Multiple competing solutions mapped in recruitment criteria  
• Dual audience targeting current end-users and ex-sellers of competing platforms