The full question
How can you improve your screener? or verify that research participants are the right ones?
My two cents
Screeners are surveys you send to potential participants for user research to verify if these people are the right ones to speak to. Usually, in such a survey, each answer is linked to two possibilities: the person stays included, or the person is excluded from the list of potential participants.
Here a few tips that helped me create better screeners:
Exclude experts: Make sure that people are not working in the organisation for which you are trying to improve the service, and verify that people are not experts in the field (for example, Service Designers, UX designers,)Ask if people work Don't forget to ask if people work at the company
Add an open-ended question to filter out low-quality participants:
People who answer with one-word responses, and illogical stuff will likely not be people that you want to have in your research as they won't give you enough details about "what's happening in their head".
Provide a catchall alternate option: Include a ‘none of the above,’ ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘other’ option to account for any outliers. Otherwise, you could end up with someone in your survey which doesn’t belong there because they were forced to choose an answer that didn’t apply to them.
Don't ask questions that are already in the recruiting data of your recruiter system: If you work with a recruiting service (like Testing Time or Pollfish), their systems usually has already a lot of data about the people in their pool that you don't have to put in your survey (like age, gender, etc.)
Going further
To go further, you can read the guide Screener Surveys for UX Research made by the recruiting service User Interviews.