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10 RECRUITMENT STORIESTHAT BROKE THE CLUTTER

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

10 WACKY RECRUITMENT STORIES

• Jung Von Matt - Trojan

• Red 5 Studios – Personalized iPod

• Uncle Grey - Fortress

• Ikea Australia – secret job description

• My Marriot

• CXO Challenge

• Quixey – 60 Second Challenge

• OgilvyOne – World’s greatest Sales Person

• Google – Cryptic Billboard

PEEK-A-BOO, OR, GUERRILLA RECRUITING

HIDDEN MESSAGING

GAMIFICATION

COMPETITIONS

GOOD OLD PRINT-ADS OR, CLICHÉ WITH A SPIN

WHAT IT COMES DOWN TO..

WHAT IS METTL?

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Okay, we know you are on LinkedIn, and if you are an HR/Staffing professional, you’ve also have been trying to recruit candidates through LinkedIn. How do we know that? Because 97% of all HR and Staffing professionals use LinkedIn in their recruiting efforts.

That’s great, because it is a veritable pool of recruiters and candidates. For numbers’ sake, that’s 225 million users across 200 countries. Awesome! That should be a cakewalk then? Fishing for fish where fish are.

Not quite. LinkedIn is too crowded, hook, line and sinker.77% of all global job offers are on LinkedIn. That means your competition and you are on LinkedIn, trying to find the best fits from among the 225 million users there are. Sounds a bit like …..the world, doesn’t it?

The place with too many people, too many recruiters and too many active and passive job seekers to find the gems from. See the problem? The problem is not the platform, or where you are. The answer to good recruiting lies in ‘how’. We are bombarded with information, most of which is just noise. And great candidates already have a job; they are

WHY THIS E-BOOK?

particularly not receptive to the noise. To cut through that clutter and deliver a communication that sticks, is the problem we should be grappling with. Suffice it to say that being on LinkedIn, or any other social platform for that matter, is not the ticket to great recruiting. Great recruitment results have always been the result of strong, disruptive recruitment campaigns. The kind, we thought deserves an eBook all for itself.

SO, HERE WE GO – 10 OF THE WACKIEST RECRUITMENT SUCCESS STORIES..

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Sounds vaguely familiar to the Trojan horse? That’s hardly surprising. Jung Von Matt’s logo is a proud Trojan horse in grey scale.

Jung Von Matt decided to invade just the space that their prospects hang out at – the design layout. Each day, 50,000 creative people around the world generate the dummy text ‘lorem ipsum’ from ipsum.com to paste on their layouts. The recruitment think-tank over at Jung Von Matt spiked

People Pasted The Spiked Text Into Their Layouts

14,000People Clicked On The

Link That Led To The Jung Von Mat Careers Page

220,000 THE RESULT?

Combined with some meaty social media buzz, the campaign became a successful branding exercise as well.

PEEK-A-BOO, OR, GUERRILLA RECRUITING

the dummy text at ipsum.com with the Art Director’s job description. When an artist pasted the dummy text into their layout, the job description would appear, with a link that redirected the artist to a page where they could fill up an application for the position of Art Director, at Jung Von Matt.

JUNG VON MATT - TROJAN

Jung Von Matt, a German advertising agency, was looking for a new art director. How could the German firm reach just the right audience, grab attention, even earn respect doing so and get potential candidates to apply to the position?

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After trying several traditional recruitment advertisement methods, including seeking talent right off the street, they realized that they were looking in the wrong places. After doing some behavioral research, Uncle Grey realized that their target market spent a lot of their time playing computer games – 8 hours a week on an average, to be precise.

Uncle Grey then created simple posters advertising the position and these were put up by the ambassadors within the game levels, there for every player to see.

The profile name would be followed by their game names since other players (potential candidates for Uncle Grey) already knew these players by their game names.

Within a week, Uncle Grey had over 50 applications from which they were able to source the ideal candidate

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UNCLE GREY - FORTRESS

Uncle Grey, the Danish agency, needed to find great Front-End Developers. Uncle Grey developed a website where

potential applicants could fill up an application. Then they got the ‘ambassadors’ to change their game profile name to the URL to the website.

They zeroed in on the most popular of these games – Team Fortress 2, and got into negotiations with the best players of it to become representatives or ambassadors for Uncle Grey, within the game, in exchange for

sponsorship offers.

HIDDENMESSAGING

RED 5 STUDIOS – PERSONALIZED IPOD

In their own words, “In the summer of 2006, Mark Kern, Bill Petras, and Taewon Yun met with advisor Jeff Loomans to discuss how to grow the Red 5 family. They all knew that recruiting in the game industry was crazy: people are constantly spammed by recruiters, and competition for quality talent is fierce. Still, the three Red 5ers were determined to hire the best and brightest minds in the industry, while communicating just how damned cool it is to work at Red 5 Studios.”

So, they thought out of the box, and fit personalized iPods inside FedEx boxes and got them delivered to 100 of their dream candidates. Custom-engraved with each recipient’s

Red 5 received responses from 90 of the 100 candidates, while most direct mail initiatives are not to be considered successful if there’s a 2 percent response rate. The icing on the cake was the enormous word-of-mouth publicity that Red 5 obtained, making the campaign viral and creating a branding effect that would outlast the campaign itself.

name and a unique code, each iPod carried a personalized

message from Mark Kern, the CEO, covering the candidate’s

previous work and inviting them to apply.

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What would you consider the best recruitment campaign? One that gets you the right employees and doesn’t require you to shell out a dime?We thought so too, but Ikea, the Swedish gaint, knew this �rst.

4285 APPLICATIONS

280 NEW HIRES

IKEA AUSTRALIA – SECRET JOB DESCRIPTION

Looking to rapidly expand their Australia business, Ikea got its customers – ‘people who love Ikea’, to deliver job descriptions to themselves, and then spread the word among their connections, leading to 4285 applications and 280 new hires.

Sheets carrying instructions on how to find a job with Ikea were planted inside every flat pack of furniture sold by Ikea. Unassuming customers took the packages home, opened it and found this inside. The campaign spoke directly to people who already loved the brand, and who’d spread the word. Here’s how the brand video summarized the campaign results.

$0 MEDIA SPEND $0 POSTAGE

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‘Career Instructions, for assembling your future’

GAMIFICATION

Gamification has been seeping into almost every other aspect of business, but has only recently begun to be used in recruiting. The obvious advantage of gamification is engagement, by fueling competition and thereby, increased participation. So when you gamify your recruitment process, you are not just giving the candidate a shot at working with you, you are providing him a chance to come out the winner among the competition, have fun in the process and then get to work with you - an offer good, competitive candidates can’t refuse.Why are we so sure?

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Gabe Zichermann, a respected authority on gami�cation and its applications, de�nes the term as "the process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems." To put it simply, gami�cation looks to attach psychological incentives to typical, even mundane, tasks – like applying for a job position. When you see an arena of business where competition could spur better results, what you see is a potential for gami�cation.

Hospitality industry is still under wraps for most youth who are at the cusp of adolescence. Marriot wanted to demystify the hospitality business, and let the youth see what goes behind the scenes themselves; even nudge them onto a career path in hospitality.

‘My Marriot’ is a simulation game akin to Farmville except that its purpose is not to generate revenue but engage, educate and potentially source good candidates into the hospitality industry, particularly from markets such as India and China which have notoriously poor hospitality-industry traditions.

Susan Strayer, a human-resources branding expert at Marriott who helped develop the game, credited the success of the game on the very basic idea behind gamification of their recruitment process,

“Not only am I having fun but I'm actually getting an understanding of what it takes to run a kitchen.”

The first iteration included a rough simulation of Marriot Kitchen.

MY MARRIOT

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The player is required to buy raw material for the kitchen based on a selection of ingredients categorized by quality and price.

Cognizant Technology Solutions is a leading IT infrastructure and business consulting company. As part of its campus engagement exercise, one of its ideas was to come up with a contest that would test the skills of some B-school graduates on several parameters. The idea was simple – to promote their brand, hand-pick students to

The credit, however, for envisioning gami�cation must probably go to Colonel Casey Wardynski who envisioned the idea in 1999. In his own words, his idea was “using computer game technology to provide the public a virtual Soldier experience that was engaging, informative and entertaining”. The game �nanced by the U.S. government and distributed by free download has grown in ways nobody imagined, not even the creators and is still being used to train and educate U.S army soldiers.

He’d also have to hire staff for ‘his’ Marriot kitchen, based on a range of experience and salaries.

Further enhancing the experience, in-game rounds required the player to assign tickets to cooks and inspect outgoing orders for quality before they reached the customers.

COGNIZANT'S CXO CHALLENGE,ON METTL

interact with their CXO team through a contest and recruit the best talent

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.

The platform was powered by Mettl’s simulator that dished out challenges across a spectrum of genres – puzzles, case challenges, guesstimates and spreadsheet analysis. The challenge was topped off with a psychometric analysis that provided insights into the basic motivations of candidates

The leaderboard feature (shown in the image) helped create the much needed social visibility to enhance competitiveness among the candidates. Cognizant could also do custom branding on the platform to create a brand experience that would stay in the campuses and would help grab the best talent even in subsequent years.The eventual 8 winners were mentored by Cognizant’s c-suite executives and the top two candidates were given cash prizes.

Cognizant partnered with Mettl to create a highly interactive online contest for

Cognizant. The context would have top B-school students competing with

each other on simulated real-world business problems to find the best

solutions.

The first round of the contest saw participation from 2300 students from 27 of

the best B-schools from all over India, Dubai, Manila and Singapore.

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COMPETITIONS

What do they do?

One such was created and executed by Quixey, a then startup, which calls itself “the search engine for apps”.

Quixey challenged engineers to solve a 60-second programming puzzle offering a $100 reward every day for a month. Programmers queued up to take the challenge for the obvious incentive and Quixey was able to find 3 full time hires and 2 intern hires during the time the contest ran.

Talking to readwrite.com, Lisa Shapira, co-founder and CTO of Quixey, surmised the effectiveness of the 60 second challenge. "We just hired a guy named Marshall who doesn't have a college degree and lives in Grand Rapids Michigan. He wouldn't come in from a Silicon Valley recruiter, but he reads Hacker News and he nailed the interview.”

Users can search by what they want to get done in natural language and the app will throw up results by crawling and collating information from multiple sources

Naturally, in their search for the best engineers Quixey had the likes of Facebook and Google as competition.

At one point, Quixey was shelling out $20k per developer hire to traditional recruiters.

QUIXEY – 60 SECOND CHALLENGE

It’s not just established stalwarts that have taken to creative

recruitment campaigns. In fact, considering the stakes a

startup has on each of its employees, it makes all the more

sense for it to break the clutter with innovative recruitment

advertising.

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It’s been said too many times, but

diamonds are indeed found in the rough. You

just need the right plough to unearth them.

As a name synonymous with great advertising, it would’ve been criminal if OgilvyOne didn’t have a recruitment campaign worth a place in this eBook.

Back in 2010, looking to add some muscle to its sales force, OgilvyOne, launched its recruitment campaign titled, ‘The Search for the World’s Greatest Sales Person’. Firmly based on David Ogilvy’s credo, ‘We sell, or else.”, OgilvyOne decided to come up with a competition to find the best salesman. And what’s the best way to judge a sales person? Get him to sell something that’s difficult to sell! That’s exactly what OgilvyOne did, asking participants to sell a brick. A YouTube channel was launched, asking participants

OGILVYONE – WORLD’S GREATEST SALES PERSON

to upload a video of them selling a brick. A targeted social media campaign made sure that news about the competition reached the right people. The reward? Three finalists would be flown to Cannes Lions Advertising Festival for a chance to compete for a fellowship with the agency.

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Our business is all about selling, and how we sell is changing fast. We thought it was time to reassert the importance of sales, honor the timeless craft of persuasion, glean wisdom from the best, and highlight the new tools and platforms which are re-shaping it for customers.

GOOGLE – CRYPTIC BILLBOARD

Back in 2004, billboards, like the one shown above, started

appearing on Highway 101, the main artery of Silicon Valley.

The enthusiastic few who solved the puzzle to its solution

and reached www.7427466391.com were then presented

another challenge.

On successfully completing it, the candidates

were greeted with the following message and

eventually rewarded with an interview at

Google headquarters.

Explained Mat Zucker, Executive Creative Director of OgilvyOne, New York and the originator of the competition. To give a glimpse of great salesmanship and its expectation, OgilvyOne seeded its YouTube channel with video snippets of celebrated salespeople using proven sales techniques to close deals.Fittingly, the YouTube video that explains the contest ends with these words – ‘close us.’

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Arguably, Google would have had more respondents to its puzzle if the billboard had carried the famous multi-color logo. But, the anonymity was not without reason, and a sound one at that: Google wasn’t looking for wannabe Googlers. .

That’s pretty much it.

Okay, no, wait. We kept the best for the last. Also, as classy as monochrome

Nice work. Well done. Mazel tov. You’ve made it to Google Labs and we’re glad you’re here. One thing we learned while building Google is that it’s easier to �nd what you’re looking for if it comes looking for you. What we’re looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.

The billboard puzzle resulted in Google finding a small group of enthusiastic ‘problem solvers’ – a trait that the

company believes makes its DNA

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GOOD OLD PRINT ADS...

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APPLE - CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS

There’s a reason why print-ads aren’t history yet.

They work.

The wordplay is hard to miss. You’d think a �rm

like Apple won’t need to try to catch your atten-

tion.

But that’s only because they make it seem so

easy almost every time.

WHAT IT COMES DOWN TO..

We hope we’ve provided you a glimpse into the largely

unexplored possibilities you could make use to create

powerful, disruptive and effective recruitment campaigns.

Any business is its employees. And today, with all the digital

noise around us, it’s tougher than ever to find the right

people for business. Perhaps then, it’s time we

acknowledged that job postings on LinkedIn and a dozen

other job boards aren’t fail-safe ways to find great

employees.

Perhaps, it’s time we acknowledged that to get the best we

need the best – disruptive recruitment campaigns attentively

crafted to reach and move great candidates.

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Mettl is a Saas based assessment platform that enables organizations to create customized assessments for use across the

entire employee lifecycle, beginning with pre-hiring screening and candidate skills assessment, training and development

programs for employees/students, certification exams, contests and more.

WHAT IS METTL?

295 East Evelyn Avenue, #215, Sunnyvale, CA 94086, USA

Mettl, Plot 97, Ground Floor, Sector 44, Gurgaon, India 122003

www.mettl.com | contact@mettl.com |

Phone: +1 650 450 4620 (U.S.) | +91 – 124 - 3220914 (India)

AuthorSharan Suresh | Product Evangelist,Mettl

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