10 RECRUITMENT STORIES

THAT BROKE THE CLUTTER

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

10 WACKY RECRUITMENT STORIES 3

PEEK-A-BOO, OR, GUERRILLA RECRUITING

• Jung Von Matt - Trojan 4
• Uncle Grey - Fortress 5

HIDDEN MESSAGING
• Red 5 Studios – Personalized iPod 6
• Ikea Australia – secret job description 7

GAMIFICATION
• My Marriot 8-9
• CXO Challenge 10 -11

COMPETITIONS
• Quixey – 60 Second Challenge 12
• OgilvyOne – World’s greatest Sales Person 13 - 14
• Google – Cryptic Billboard 14 - 15

GOOD OLD PRINT-ADS OR, CLICHÉ WITH A SPIN 16

WHAT IT COMES DOWN TO.. 17

WHAT IS METTL? 18
WHY THIS E-BOOK?

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?
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.

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

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PEEK-A-BOO, OR,
GUERRILLA RECRUITING
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?
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.
Sounds vaguely familiar to the
Trojan horse? That’s hardly
surprising. Jung Von Matt’s logo
is a proud Trojan horse in grey
scale.

220,000 THE RESULT?

People Pasted The Spiked
Text Into Their Layouts Combined with some
meaty social media
Jung Von Matt decided to invade just the space that their buzz, the campaign
prospects hang out at – the design layout. Each day, 50,000 14,000 became a successful
creative people around the world generate the dummy text People Clicked On The branding exercise as
Link That Led To The Jung
‘lorem ipsum’ from ipsum.com to paste on their layouts.
Von Mat Careers Page
well.
The recruitment think-tank over at Jung Von Matt spiked

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UNCLE GREY - FORTRESS
Uncle Grey, the Danish agency, needed to find great
Front-End Developers.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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

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HIDDEN
MESSAGING

RED 5 STUDIOS – PERSONALIZED name and a unique code, each iPod carried a personalized
IPOD message from Mark Kern, the CEO, covering the candidate’s
previous work and inviting them to apply.
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.” Red 5 received responses from 90 of the 100 candidates,
while most direct mail initiatives are not to be considered
So, they thought out of the box, and fit personalized iPods successful if there’s a 2 percent response rate. The icing on
inside FedEx boxes and got them delivered to 100 of their the cake was the enormous word-of-mouth publicity that
dream candidates. Custom-engraved with each recipient’s Red 5 obtained, making the campaign viral and creating a
branding effect that would outlast the campaign itself.

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 first.

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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.

‘Career Instructions, for assembling your future’

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 4285 280

APPLICATIONS NEW HIRES

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GAMIFICATION

Gabe Zichermann, a respected authority on gamification and its applications, defines the term as "the
process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems." To put it simply,
gamification 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 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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MY MARRIOT
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.

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

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 Further enhancing the experience, in-game
He’d also have to hire staff for ‘his’ Marriot
rounds required the player to assign tickets to
kitchen, based on a range of experience and
cooks and inspect outgoing orders for quality
salaries.
before they reached the customers.

The credit, however, for envisioning gamification 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 financed 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.

COGNIZANT'S CXO CHALLENGE,ON METTL

Cognizant Technology Solutions is a leading IT interact with their CXO team through a contest and recruit
infrastructure and business consulting company. As part of the best talent .
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

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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
Cognizant partnered with Mettl to create a highly interactive online contest for
on the platform to create a brand
Cognizant. The context would have top B-school students competing with experience that would stay in the
each other on simulated real-world business problems to find the best campuses and would help grab the best
solutions. talent even in subsequent years.
The first round of the contest saw participation from 2300 students from 27 of The eventual 8 winners were mentored by
the best B-schools from all over India, Dubai, Manila and Singapore. Cognizant’s c-suite executives and the top
two candidates were given cash prizes.

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COMPETITIONS
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.
One such was created and executed by Quixey, a then
startup, which calls itself “the search engine for apps”.
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.
What do they do?
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.”
It’s been said too many times, but
diamonds are indeed found in the rough. You
just need the right plough to unearth them.
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OGILVYONE – WORLD’S GREATEST SALES PERSON
As a name synonymous with great advertising, it would’ve to upload a video of them selling a brick. A targeted social
been criminal if OgilvyOne didn’t have a recruitment media campaign made sure that news about the
campaign worth a place in this eBook. competition reached the right people. The reward? Three
finalists would be flown to Cannes Lions Advertising Festival
Back in 2010, looking to add some muscle to its sales force, for a chance to compete for a fellowship with the agency.
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

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.

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Explained Mat Zucker, Executive Creative Director of
OgilvyOne, New York and the originator of the competition. GOOGLE – CRYPTIC BILLBOARD
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.’

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.

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 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 find 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.

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. .

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

That’s pretty much it.

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

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GOOD OLD PRINT ADS...

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 firm

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.

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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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WHAT IS
METTL?
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entire employee lifecycle, beginning with pre-hiring screening and candidate skills assessment, training and development
programs for employees/students, certification exams, contests and more.

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Sharan Suresh | Product Evangelist, Phone: +1 650 450 4620 (U.S.) | +91 – 124 - 3220914 (India)
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