Panel Hygiene Audit

Panel Hygiene Audit

Run a structured read of your candidate panel: who's been over-recruited, which segments are running thin, which candidates are inside their cooldown window, and where the agent would recommend recruiting from next. This skill audits and reports. It doesn't shortlist, invite, or modify candidates; that's the recruitment skill's job.

How to customize

This template ships with sensible defaults. Most of the value is in the {{placeholders}} in Your rules, which encode your team's panel-health thresholds and policy. The How this works with Great Question section is the orchestration logic; change it only when GQ's workflow itself changes, not as a way of expressing policy. The External-system hooks section is empty by default. Add your team's integrations there. For the recruitment workflow itself (shortlist, send invitations), see the recruitment skill. This skill informs that decision but doesn't make it.

Agent setup

Before executing this skill, list the available MCP tools on the Great Question server and identify the tools that map to each step in How this works with Great Question. The step descriptions name intents (for example, "list saved candidate segments"), not specific tool names. Use the MCP server's own tool descriptions to resolve each intent to a concrete tool call at runtime. If you can't resolve an intent to exactly one tool, ask the researcher rather than guessing.

Your rules

Health thresholds

• Over-recruitment threshold: {{over_recruitment_threshold}}
• Cooldown period: {{cooldown_period_days}}
• Segment health threshold: {{segment_health_threshold}}
• Engagement quality: {{engagement_quality_rule}}

Audit scope

• Default lookback window: {{default_lookback_days}}
• Default audit scope: {{default_audit_scope}}
• Specific segments to always include: {{always_audit_segments}}
• Segments to always exclude: {{never_audit_segments}}

Remediation framing

• What "healthy" looks like in the report: {{healthy_definition}}
• How to phrase concerns: {{concern_phrasing_rule}}
• Recommended action types: {{recommended_action_types}}

How this works with Great Question

The agent runs these steps in order.

1. Understand the audit request

Gather, from the researcher:

• The scope. Is this a general panel health check, an audit ahead of a specific study, or a deep-dive on one segment?
• Any segments to focus on or exclude beyond the Your rules defaults.
• The lookback window if different from the Your rules default.
• What output the researcher wants: a written report, a list of action items, both. If the request is general ("how healthy is our panel?"), surface the Your rules default scope as a starting point and let the researcher narrow or broaden.

2. Enumerate the segments in scope

List the saved candidate segments on the account. Apply:

• The Your rules default audit scope (e.g., "top 10 by recruitment volume" or "all segments").
• The always-include and never-exclude rules from Your rules.
• Anything the researcher named in step 1. End of step 2: a list of segments to audit.

3. Pull candidate-level data for each segment in scope

For each segment:

• Resolve the segment to its candidate pool.
• For each candidate in the pool, gather participation history within the lookback window. This is read-heavy. For large segments, the agent should paginate cleanly rather than trying to pull the entire pool in one call. Surface the pagination state to the researcher if it affects how quickly the audit completes.

4. Apply the health rules from Your rules

For each candidate, determine:

• Are they currently on cooldown (per Your rules cooldown period)?
• Are they over-recruited (per Your rules over-recruitment threshold)?
• Are they showing engagement decay (per Your rules engagement quality rule)? For each segment, aggregate:
• Total candidates, contactable candidates, candidates not on cooldown, healthy candidates (contactable + not on cooldown + not over-recruited + not engagement-decayed).
• Compare against the Your rules segment health threshold.

5. Draft the report

Apply the Your rules concern-phrasing rule. The report has three parts:

• Snapshot: what's healthy, what's concerning, what's critical. One-line per segment with the headline number.
• Detail per segment: for each segment, the breakdown of total / contactable / not-on-cooldown / healthy. Flag the candidates contributing most to over-recruitment or engagement decay so the researcher can investigate individually if needed.
• Recommendations: for each concerning or critical segment, one or two recommended actions from the Your rules recommended-action-types list. Don't pad. If a segment is healthy, don't invent a recommendation.

6. Hand back to the researcher

Send the researcher:

• The report.
• A short inventory: which segments audited, which candidates flagged individually, any segments the agent couldn't fully audit (e.g., pagination limits or missing data).
• A pointer to the recruitment skill for any action the researcher decides to take. The audit doesn't act; it informs.

Notes for the agent

• This skill is read-only by design. No shortlisting, no invitations, no candidate updates. The audit informs decisions; the recruitment skill acts on them. If the researcher asks "okay, invite the healthy candidates from segment X," hand them to the recruitment skill rather than acting in this skill.
• Segments are read-only via MCP today. The agent can list, get, and use segments as filters, but can't create or modify segment definitions through this skill. If a recommendation calls for splitting a segment into sub-segments, the recommendation is for the researcher to do that work in the GQ UI; the agent can't.
• Large segments need paginated reads. The candidate-search and list tools paginate. For segments with hundreds of candidates, the audit may take multiple calls. Surface the pagination state if it affects how the audit completes; don't silently truncate at the first page.
• Server-side filters (contactability, restriction, eligibility) are inherited by reads. The agent's view of a segment is already filtered to what the caller can access. If a segment appears smaller than the researcher expects, restriction may be in play; mention that as a possible explanation rather than reporting a misleading count.
• Don't recommend over-contacting cooldown candidates. No matter how short a segment is, the cooldown rule from Your rules is policy, not a suggestion. The remediation options are broaden, grow, pause, or split, not "recruit through the cooldown."

External-system hooks

None in the library template. The skill works end-to-end against Great Question alone. Common extensions teams add when they fork:

• Cross-reference segments against external CRM or product-usage data to surface segments whose definition has drifted from how the underlying audience actually behaves.
• Push the report into a recurring panel-health dashboard outside GQ so the team can spot trends across audits.
• Open a ticket per critical segment so remediation work has a tracked artifact.
• Schedule the audit on a recurring basis (e.g., monthly) so panel hygiene becomes a habit, not a one-off. Each of these is your fork's responsibility, not the library template's.

Example

A researcher pastes a request like:

Run a panel hygiene audit before we launch the Q3 enterprise admin study. Focus on the enterprise segments. The agent:

1. Resolves the MCP tool names against the live server (per the Agent setup section).
2. Confirms scope (enterprise segments only) and lookback (90 days, per Your rules default).
3. Lists saved segments. Filters to enterprise-named segments plus the always-include set from Your rules: enterprise-admins-US, enterprise-admins-EU, enterprise-decision-makers, and the always-included high-engagement-panel.
4. Pulls candidates and participation history for each segment.
5. Applies thresholds: cooldown (60 days), over-recruitment (more than 3 studies in 12 months), engagement decay (2+ recent declines).
6. Aggregates:
   • enterprise-admins-US: 64 total, 51 contactable, 38 not on cooldown, 29 healthy. Healthy ✓.
   • enterprise-admins-EU: 22 total, 18 contactable, 12 not on cooldown, 9 healthy. Concerning. Recommendation: broaden the segment criteria (currently filters to only 5 countries) before launching the Q3 study.
   • enterprise-decision-makers: 41 total, 35 contactable, 28 not on cooldown, 24 healthy. Healthy ✓.
   • high-engagement-panel: 18 total, 17 contactable, 4 not on cooldown, 4 healthy. Critical. Recommendation: pause recruitment from this segment for a quarter to let cooldown clear; consider running a panel-growth study to refresh it.
7. Hands back the report with the four segment summaries, the recommendations, a flagged list of 6 candidates contributing disproportionately to over-recruitment across the audited segments, and a pointer to the recruitment skill for action. Time elapsed: a couple of minutes for a focused audit; longer for a full panel scan. The value is consistency: the same thresholds applied every time, the same recommendation framing, no editorializing beyond the numbers.

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-06-10): Initial library template version. Read-only audit workflow. Covers segment-level and candidate-level health checks against Your rules thresholds. Hands off to the recruitment skill for action.