In a Spot[ify] of bother
Courting your dream job in the 2.0 era
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A review on the automated recruiting process and my attempt to overcome it with an ads campaign targeted directly to the employees of the company I want to be part of, including results and the lessons of the process.
The needs of man drive him forward, passion, even more so. Here is one such tale, the account of how I went about to try and pursue my occupational better half.
I’m a music lover who’s convinced that music makes people’s life better, and like most regular guys I have a dream job and I’m very particular about the company I fervently want to work for and the role I want to play. Being qualified enough, what’s stopping me from getting this dream job? The answer lies in competition.
For a company of 1200+ people with a 5.4 ratio of followers of @Spotifyjobs / Spotify’s workforce and 107 openings at the time written (8% increase of the payroll) is easy to understand that the company is facing a huge growth pain and that I’m just one over thousands of applicants for these openings. We’ve all been here; hence we know that to get a job this colossal, my application needs to stand out from the rest. And with my adrenaline triggered, I chose to do exactly that.
In order to excel, all I have to do is overcome the “recruiting intelligence system”. These systems are used with the intention of making the process easier for the companies and for the job seekers as well, and it sounds awesome, the problem is that with all this automation and uniformity comes… standardization of the candidates and the difficulty to shine beyond the lines of a resume displayed on a computer screen. Being on the job hunt after an MBA, this is a concern some of my colleagues and I have faced lately.
This Harvard Business Review article by Peter Capelli addressed one of the ways the mentioned system could go wrong with the following:
“One bad way has been to screw down the requirements on the existing applicant tracking system to screen out all but a few candidates. It’s almost impossible to do that with any precision, and a likely consequence is overreliance on credentials or experience that are not all that relevant to the job.”
This error is especially likely to happen in results driven roles that involve a great amount of soft skills like Marketing or Business Creation where rare capabilities like creativity might be better perceived through face to face interaction, so I would compute in this loss not only the cost of bad hiring but unquantifiable cost of the missed unusual but ideal talent. Vile system, I’m onto you.
The maneuver
In an effort to revamp this situation, I chose to venture online and showcase my marketing skills exclusively to existing employees of Spotify, the company I zealously want to work for. In a span of thirty-one days, they were victims of this crusade through numerous LinkedIn ads campaign and twitter gimmicks that ironically turned the advertiser into the advertised.
TIP: You can target ads to a company on LinkedIn if you create a Business premium account
This endeavour collected clicks of more than 180 Spotify employees (with a 0.2% Click-through rate) that went directly to my LinkedIn profile and allowed me to connect and share Emails or Skype conversations with more than two dozen of them (some recruiters included). To put things in perspective, I got to interact with 15% of the company workforce and I even managed to exchange tweets with Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek!
What is this all for? One might ask. This campaign was a simple and light hearted effort to get noticed and to stand out from the crowd with a rather funny approach with most ads having witty one-liners and catchy titles like ‘Let’s Spotify together’ redirecting to the song, ‘Let’s work together by Canned Heat.’ Or ‘All you need is LOVE — The Beatles said. An opportunity at Spotify is what I need’ directing to my LinkedIn profile.
With this effort I wanted every Spotify employee to know who I am even before I join the company; specially recruiters that might in the future step into my resume and say “Hey! This is the guy with the campaign!” — Marketers know the value of positive recall.
There are many positives I could take from the campaign. For starters, I made some resourceful connections and got valuable insights about the company, i.e. how’s the culture, the work practices, experiences from employees with similar roles to which I’m targeting and also very useful advices about how to proceed to achieve my objective (Which 100% of the time included “don’t stop looking at our job site”). A very pleasant surprise was how willing the employees were to help and to be contacted independently of how busy their schedules were; This is something to be grateful about and I think speaks more than just words about being a cool company.
The next step for me is definitely to keep on trying and maybe do something even more stimulating, right? (Maybe something that includes me in a canon aimed to the Stockholm headquarters). Indeed, the recruiting process at Spotify is as flexible as it can be and for a company on the spotlight; this is no easy task, but if I had to give an advice to every company out there in the same situation, it’d be to be always attentive to passion and drive. As indicated by Randy Komisar at Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur “Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do” This can be a powerful mix and connecting with these potential employees at an early stage will lead to a healthier talent pool and happier and more engaged future employees.
To all the job hunters out into the wild, all I can say is that this is an endurance process that must be faced with creativity and endless optimism. Keep the spirit up and don’t get desperate. Prove yourself how far you are willing to go to achieve your goals and do something out of the ordinary in order to grasp hold of something that proves to be so elusive.
Juan P. Patti
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanpatti
juanppatti@gmail.com
Recommend it if you like it, Let’s inspire the job hunters!
(Click on the heart ❤)
