We’ve seen quite a few ingenious ways to use the Web for recruitment or to land a job. The Daily Mail newspaper’s job advert in its search engine-targeted robot.txt immediately springs to mind as does the ad man who bought up Google Adwords spots next to the names of six ad executives he wanted to work with.
But the following effort from German digital marketing agency Jung von Matt/Neckar involving Facebook Places before it had launched locally is the stealthiest of them all. Here’s how it worked:
After the much publicized unveiling of Facebook Places in the U.S., the clever folks at Stuttgart-based Jung von Matt/Neckar figured that it would only be time before the location feature saw its German launch. But why wait they thought, and instead tunneled in to the service VPN-style, simulating a U.S. IP address in order to gain access.
They then set about creating Places for a whole bunch of competing agencies, such as Neue Digitale / Razorfish (Frankfurt), Interone (Hamburg), Fork Unstable Media (Hamburg), Kolle Rebbe (Hamburg), AKQA (Berlin) and Argonauten G2 (Berlin).
Then, following Facebook Places’ German launch, when anybody at those agencies checked in via Facebook they saw one of two messages:
“First! Want to join? Check in at www.jvm-neckar.de/jobs, we are hiring.”
Or our favourite…
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“Hi, from the trojan horses inside. Want to join? Check in at www.jvm-neckar.de/jobs, we are hiring.”
Jung von Matt/Neckar say the aim of the campaign was to first show its competitors that they are faster than them, and to put the company on the radar of high profile digital creatives.
Job done.
