People should be a company’s number one priority. The fact of the matter is your business cannot exist without the people that power it. However, “getting people” is no small task and it should not be treated as such. Businesses are making huge efforts to attract top talent acknowledging the best candidates have options so you have to woo them somehow. Some people say chivalry is dead, but I think it’s heating up again. These recruiting campaigns show us businesses are still courting their top picks and letting them know they’re special.
5. Twitter revolutionized social media and communication. 140 characters or less is now the new normal, and I must admit I prefer it to page long email updates. Twitter’s on-going hiring campaign is called, “Join the Flock.” Since they invented the micro-blogging network it makes sense they would be the first to create a twitter handle (@JoinTheFlock) aimed solely at attracting and engaging candidate and informing followers of jobs. The Join the Flock handle and campaign are a clever way to play off their blue bird icon, and of course the verb they have embedded in us so much it’s dictionary worthy: Tweet, Tweet.
4. Capital One’s hiring campaign was not only to hire employees for their own business but to encourage other companies to hire as well. Hiring 500,000 Heroes campaign an initiative spearheaded by the National Chamber Foundation and Capital One aims to hire at least 500,000 veterans, and military spouses amongst themselves and other partners by the end of 2014. This is a long term-project and one that’s important for a variety of obvious reasons.
3. Atlassian sets the bar high for innovative recruitment campaigns. We’ve discussed their “Steal Your Geeks Campaign,” but they’ve also won awards for the “32 Campaign” which aimed to hire 32 engineers in a short amount of time. They ditched traditional recruiting techniques and put all their eggs into social media. By doing this they increased the number of job applicants by 350%. What does this tell me? The power of social media is real and companies who take initiative to communicate where their target candidates are, win.
2. Hipster a question and answer mobile platform created a hiring campaign true to its name offering new hires all the “accouterments of hipsterdom.” Hipster needed to scale and the new hires made through the campaign would be given $10,000, a years supply of PBR (soooooo hipster), a bicycle, pair of oversized glasses, skinny jeans, a bow-tie, mustache-grooming services and a pair of boots. Not only does this campaign perfectly with the company’s brand and name, apparently it worked really well attracting top candidates from Google, Oracle, AOL, Twitter and Salesforce. How would a hipster describe success? … Hipster has since shut it’s doors. But it was cool while it lasted.
1. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is a full service monster ad agency, so it comes with the territory that these guys are extra creatives. When it came to hiring an assistant for Rich Silverstein himself they produced nothing less than amazing- the Work4Rich campaign. Goodby Silverstein created a web page that consisted of “challenges” and assignments before candidates could actually apply. It sounds like a bummer, but seeing as this went viral and I even joined the fun it wasn’t the case at all.
These days companies are coming up with all sorts of cool ways to attract talent, from billboards, to company videos, to bus tours around Europe. Some are even going as far to infiltrate your hobbies; For example, recruiting university talent while they’re playing Farmville. Yes, THAT Farmville. Your company needs to create a hiring culture in order to sustain itself and create positive candidate experiences, and of course lots of buzz. The competition is real and unless you take it seriously there’s no way to attract top talent without losing the crème of the crop to the companies that are actually going out of their way to court their candidates.
