Eyes Wide Sparked — the recruitment challenge solved by Despark and Dextrophobia Rooms

Like every normally growing company in our sector we are struggling to find good professionals to join Despark’s team. However, instead of just whining about it we decided to take a more structured approach and analyse the problems we are facing.

Problem No1 Recruiting in Bulgaria’s IT sector became more and more difficult in the recent years. There are several reasons for this, but mostly it is a supply and demand problem. The demand for experienced developers is very high and this reduces our chances of finding a good fit for us.

Problem No2 The struggle to easily “separate the wheat from the chaff” and not waste both ours and the candidates time if they are not the right cultural or skill fit for us.

Problem No3 Even if you have identified your perfect future teammates it is very hard to approach and talk to them due to the enormous “noise” around them. Those people are constantly bombarded with job offers, LinkedIn messages, chased by companies and literally hunted by recruiters.

Despark’s approach to challenges has always been innovative, we do not compromise with the quality and creativeness of our ideas, regardless if we are solving a client’s or internal problem. To differentiate Despark and build a good employer brand while staying out of corporate bullshit talk is not very easy. As a boutique digital agency, we pride with our values, our transparency and the great quality and experience of our team. Those are the 3 key assets we offer to professionals who are interested in joining us. We wanted to integrate those in a short, but powerful experience that would impact the way people perceive Despark as an employer. This was the major challenge, so after a few idea discussions we decided to build an escape room in our office with a story that immerses the players into a different reality. One that shows how different we are from all the other employers in the sector.

We invited Dextrophobia rooms (pioneers of the escape room experience in Bulgaria) to collaborate on a totally game changing event, targeting developers and IT professionals. None of us knew if it is going to work or will be a total failure — as this is something that is done for the first time in Bulgaria.

Together, we created a new dystopian world which is ruled by SADE Corp — a corporation that uses people’s energy to thrive and become stronger and stronger. The player’s personality is not important, neither his values. In this world the only important thing is the well being of the corporation. All our guests entered this world and had to make a choice how to get out of it with the help of Despark’s 5 key values.

Once we had the idea of the room and the story, we were sure that anyone who sets foot in it will understand what differentiates us and what Despark’s values are.

After we defined the event essence came the other challenge — how do we bring the right people over? Just a Facebook invite would not work, this needed something catchier. We gathered half of Despark’s team and asked what made them come over for an interview and what would make an impression if someone tries to recruit them for another company. After a (bit crazy) brainstorming session, we decided to split the promotion efforts in two directions — online ads targeting a very tightly defined segment and offline — a more aggressive invitation.

In the social campaign we created a series of Facebook ads and targeted them to professionals from companies we like who meet our requirements based on the platform’s segmentation capabilities.

The offline campaign was more amusing for us all. We partnered with Ailyak Beer and branded cases with craft brew as event invites. Then we sent them to the offices of the companies we identified above, addressed to their JS developers. ;)

We used “stereo” effect for the message on the beer tags, which made it difficult to read for the naked eye. Each box of beers had branded stereo glasses attached to the lids.

The result was impressive — 40 people went trough the room in 2 hours. Our office turned into an escape room/party area and for one evening we managed to talk to around 30 people who were willing to join Despark’s team. We got to continue the conversation with them and had 2 potential JS Developer leads out of it. Furthermore, we made sure that everyone who came to the event would become our evangelist and share their experience with fellow professionals in the industry.

Alexander Grozdanov, Founder of Dextrophobia Rooms

“Working on the Eyes Wide Sparked project was a next level challenge for Dextrophobia Rooms team.

Bringing together the amazing culture of a truly innovative company and sharing their values and passion to the audience, was a real-life jigsaw (fortunately, this is what we are good at).

At some point of the project our biggest fear was not related to the project itself (which was more of a pleasure to work with the Desparkians than a task), but not to lose our own employees to the company as we were all involved for real in their mission and vision”