Design interns and students have limited time, budget and knowledge so they may not be the best people to comment on recruitment. It is expected to be guerilla-esque. Only researchers in senior roles and above will have a good idea of what goes on in finding the right participants for the study.

There are many challenges in setting up a recruitment practise in-house:

- ReOps comes in later stages after a couple of researchers (3-4) are on-board. Until then researchers use the tools at their disposal like survey, emails, etc to reach out to users.

- Even if the company has an in-house recruiter, there will be instances when the company is working on something new and wouldn't want to disclose it to new users. Going via an external agency circumvents this.

- Also when doing research across different geographies, it is not possible for an in-house team to manage things.

In short, there are some benefits of having an in-house recruiter/panel as it cuts down the time for recruitment but there are many genuine cases where we need to use an external agency. That in no way signifies the researcher is 'lazy' or 'not ready to put in the work'. Researchers have a lot to juggle and taking one thing off the plate frees up a bunch of time!