How I got 1.123 professionals to read my CV without sending a single application e-mail
Ok, first things first. I want to apologise for the misleading headline. I wrote two proactive applications in total, where I got rejected or was put on hold. However, as I have clarified that, let’s get back to spring 2018 when I started my job search.

Prolog: When you realise, your student life is over
It was April 2018, I was doing my Master in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Antwerp Management School and it was the time where all of a sudden my class mates and myself seemed to freak out about getting a job. Almost every small talk in our school’s foyer started with “Do you have a job already?” or “What will you do after graduation?”. The more days passed, more and more of us got favourable job offers, got accepted for promising traineeships and it appeared to me that a lot of people seemed to have a plan, all of a sudden.
I did not. I realized that sh*t is going to be real, the last weeks of my 4,5 years lasting student life are going to count down rapidly and I faced myself not knowing anything about what to do after school. In the past, I always planned ahead. Not days, not weeks, but months, quarters and even years. I don’t know what happened, but at this time my planning period somehow ended with the end of June.
So, I did what I had to do and what was expected of me, I startet the job hunt. In Belgium. As a neither Dutch nor French speaking grad student with Austrian accent. With business background and marketing affinity. Exactly the profile no one ever is looking for in Benelux, these days. My first steps were pretty straightforward, every good application starts with preparation, I thought. So I subscribed for LinkedIn Premium, updated my CV and I was ready to rumble.
But the more time I spent with preparation and the more I reflected on my USP on the Benelux job market, the more I realised, that this procedure won’t bring me anywhere. Or at least not where I wanted to be, which — back then — I did not even know myself. So I questioned my application process myself and looked back how I got jobs previously.
A short flashback how I landed an internship in 2016
In 2016 I was looking for a 4–6 months internship. I sent out many applications, back then with even less experience and skills, but with a clearer plan. I knew at least the kind of company I wanted to work for and I knew that those kind of companies (tech, startups, marketing) don’t care about certificates I got during my Bachelor’s. So I adjusted the way I applied and tried out different things (video, selfie interview, Snapchat). And voila, I landed an internship in one of the coolest startups in Vienna — hokify, a mobile recruiting platform. I noticed that they were trying out Snapchat as a new marketing channel and I knew that in their initial phase of engaging with it, they might allocate special attention to their newly generated Snapchat audience. So I replied to one of their first stories with a Snap of my CV and the caption “#hireme”. Two e-mails and a face-to-face interview with hokify’s CMO Karl Edlbauer later I got the internship. While I spent hours preparing fancy cover letters with standard and not-so-standard phrases to other companies (and still waiting for replies from Red Bull and co) it took me 10 seconds to gain the attention of a company I really wanted to work for and where I eventually gained a job and learned so many useful things which I still apply on a day to day basis.

So, back to Snapchat? No, man it’s 2018 and those glory days are over. But I wanted to go back to the “different” approach, which seemed to be a promising one for me.
The war for talents vs. the war of talents
Therefore, I rethought the application process as a whole and I tried to see applications from a business perspective. I soon realized that for a young graduate, you can participate in two markets aka wars.
I) Seller’s Market aka “The war for talents”:
According to a bunch of business magazines, millenials find themselves in the war for talents. Sounds promising, I thought. But that’s only one side of the coin. It’s right if you were smart enough to enroll for courses like computer science, maths, any kind of tech or natural sciences and eventually finish it. And if you were even smarter you combined it with a Master’s or post-grad degree in management or business. If you find yourself here, welcome to the good side of the job market (or war).
II) Buyer’s market aka “The war of talents”:
Aka welcome to the club. Let’s be honest, there are just so many of us. Business students with some affinity for marketing, sales or finance, who did a couple of internships, master Powerpoint and Excel but fail in writing basic HTML or CSS code. We are like the candy section in a supermarket. A lot of different brands but in the end we all taste similar. We get noticed if the buyer (= employer) trusts our label (= ranking of our university/business school), if we have a fancy packaging (= good looking CV) or happen to be placed in the pole position — e.g. at the supermarket’s cash desk — where the buyer is forced to face you somehow (= your own or mom and dad’s network).
So I turned my rookie marketing skills into action and switched some roles. I am the brand, the recruiter/employer is the customer and all that matters is getting my product (my CV/professional profile) off the shelf to the buyer.
Changing application dogmas and put yourself into the recruiter’s point of view
I thought about the pains recruiters face when they open a new position and made some hypotheses around the process (customer journey). I assumed that recruiters have a hard time filtering all the applications they receive in their mailboxes. Most of the applicants might have a very similar profile, may even use the same CV template (MS Word, the more creative ones opt for Canva). This goes hand in hand with the very same cover letter phrases used, similar structures (“my strengths/weaknesses are…”) and “kind of a distance” to the recruiter.
In the end, recruiters are humans too and so I decided a more human approach to my application. With the use of an online marketing mix, I created the #HireOlli campaign.
For this, I defined two key areas which were built around the following questions:
I) How does the recruiter want to consume information?
I decided to go for three different kinds of “media” and created a content mix. First, I built a landing page which was basically the story of my life (aka CV) and visualised in an interactive way. The page was optimized for desktop and mobile usage for the best possible experience, when a recruiter for example checked my site on the way to work. The structure was easy to follow and through accordion elements on the page, the visitor could decide which kind of information she/he wants to access. Complementary, I created a 1 minute video (such as you know it from Social Media) and offered the audience to download my CV in a ready-to-print format.

Furthermore, I wanted the page to reflect my brand as authentically as possible. Customers like authenticity on online channels, why should that be different for my target group? I added images of me, which I collected from the different key moments of my life and combined it with short paragraphs about what those moments were about and how they shaped my professional life. And instead of adding my strengths and weaknesses in a traditional way (as you might learn it in overpriced application workshops) I told them my story and wanted them to REALLY understand where I am good at and where I am not.
II) Where can I “meet” the recruiter?
A website without visitors is like a Porsche that’s chained in your garage. Therefore, it was of big importance to me to spread the word about the #HireOlli campaign. So I chose to use a mix of organic posting (personal Facebook and Linkedin) as well as Facebook Ads to do so. For the Facebook Ads, I created a Facebook Page, called “Hire Oliver Allmoslechner”, which only purpose it was to run Ads on it. Then I set up an Ads account and targeted recruiters and business owners/founders in Benelux, who were especially interested in tech. I made sure the campaign was published on the relevant Facebook placements (newsfeed, audience network, instagram and stories) and spent 60 Euros in three tranches within a month (3 x 20 Euros) on running it.

#HireOlli — Some results
It took me a weekend to set it up plus two days of optimization (including re-writing my ready-to-print CV and making the video) and on April, 24th I eventually launched it.
From April 24th to May 25th 1.123 unique visitors started 1.241 sessions on the #HireOlli page, 30 of them clicked on the “Hire Olli” call-to-action (e-mail) and 150 people downloaded the ready-to-print CV. Google Analytics tracked that, on average, visitors spent 6 minutes and 46 seconds on my website (including watching the video).

My Facebook Ads costed me between 22 and 30 Cents per link click, the Ads themselves had a relevance score between 7 and even 10 (out of 10), which was one of the best results I ever had when running Facebook campaigns previously.
Apart from the quantitative analytics, the most exciting thing about the campaign was, that people started talking about it.

I got mentioned by HR professionals on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, dozens of friends but also strangers engaged with me, stating they’d be happy to refer me to their bosses and gave me positive feedback on the #HireOlli campaign.


In the end, I was in a quite comfortable position and gathered 15 concrete leads to potential employers, including Facebook itself. The latter was because in a campaign test, I targeted Facebook employees ON Facebook in one Ad Set, resulted in three Facebookers reaching out to me via e-mail and LinkedIn.
Final thoughts. Do we all need to run Facebook Ads campaigns when applying for jobs now?
The answer is no. Then, why am I writing all this? Firstly, I want to emphasise that we should get rid of dogmas. Even though I know that the approach I took is not suitable for most vacancies out there, I could show that when you want to stand out of the crowd, (especially when you’re like me participating in the war of talents) you need to know your customer (aka your potential employer). Analyse how and where your target audience might consume information and try to rethink the “usual” way you would have reached out to them. Take over the point of view of your potential employer and try to find out how she/he could get approached differently. I used my basic knowledge in digital marketing to set up an online campaign and targeted businesses active in this field, knowing they would most likely engage via those channels while I was able to present parts of my skillset in a practical way already.
So, what will your next application look like?
And… Who #HiredOlli?
— — Update — —
After graduation, I started a project together with a friend and one of our professors at Antwerp Management School — sleevesup.io (offline atm). It was a 5 months venturing bootcamp, where we passed different problems through a design thinking funnel in order to build a viable venture. We reached MVP phase in September 2018 with one of our concepts — landofrent.com — a B2B heavy equipment booking platform for the SME construction industry. Unfortunately, due to a lack of product-market-fit we stopped the project by the end of November 2018. Afterwards I was hired by 0smosis — a fintech venture studio based in Antwerp.
Due to personal changes in my life, I am currently attending Le Wagon Lisbon — a fullstack web development program — in order to add more technical skills to my venture-building toolbox.
What’s next? You tell me.
