How We Made “The Coolest Hiring Campaign” Happen In 1 Week, Thanks To Rahul Subramanian
1 LinkedIn post, 5 Edits, 200k views and counting, over 2700 likes and 135 comments later. We have 300+ engineer applications and 2–3 potential hires out of those in the coming week.
On the last week of October, a crisp Wednesday morning after a Tuesday ‘accidental PR day’ (that’s a story for another time!), saw the whole tech team, product team and the social media team at InVideo activated for the first 2 hours of their work day to closely follow a hiring campaign. You must’ve instantly thought of the ridiculous amount of manpower gone into this little online activity and if it was even worth it? Well, you’ll know just that in a bit.
When it comes to brand marketing and communication, here’s a rule we follow — we experiment and fail more rather than ‘following the trend’. If it’s a success (our definition of ‘success’ for the activity), we set an example and write a case study to share the knowledge. If it’s a failure, we learn and move on to the next experiment.
The idea of the hiring campaign was seeded a couple of months ago by Sanket, our CEO. I remember getting a call from him saying, “We should do a PR activity just to hire the best engineers in the country.” No branding, no sign ups, just to get the best engineers to join our team. I quickly laughed at the idea until I sensed the frustration, desperation and seriousness in his voice.
Tech is at the root of everything we do at InVideo and we almost work real-time on user feedback.
And because of the small tech team (with only those many hands) in the company, the pace of the organisation was getting affected. To avoid the cumulative effect, P0 was to hire and hire good.
So obviously, we were desperate for tech talent and we had to start getting creative with our ideas to get the best of the best quickly, before anyone else did.
To give you a quick reality check on what I’m talking about — just till a week ago, Sanket was making cold calls to engineers everyday. Yup, that’s the CEO I’m talking about. Something had to be done rather swiftly, so he could focus on other important aspects of our ever-changing and maturing product.
The success metric for the hiring campaign would be simple and straightforward - if we hire 3 engineers, it’s a success. If we hire 2, it’s good. Anything less than 2 would have been a failure and I wouldn’t be writing this blog. We began brainstorming on how to achieve these conversions, and with that objective in mind, we made a meme (thanks to our social media team!) to announce we’re hiring. This, Biswa Kalyan Rath had kindly shared on his Instagram story. God bless him! But…
This hiring post of ours got 200+ shares when we had just over 3000 followers on Instagram. Did we want to continue experimenting and fail more? Would Biswa have shared this post if we didn’t think out of the box here? We got about a 100 applications through Biswa’s share, and despite hitting the quantity index with this viral-worthy post, it didn’t pass the quality index. We hired zero candidates out of this activity.
We failed here but learnt a thing or two and went back to the drawing board. This time to solve for quality applications. We drifted towards LinkedIn quite naturally.
Yes, everyone hires on LinkedIn and job portals saying “We are hiring”, we wanted to do the same thing but differently, and with a touch of creativity. We wanted smart engineers on LinkedIn to sit up and take note of us. How do we do that? By being smart! We sought a LinkedIn influencer who our target (tech) audience interacts with in their free time and also listens to. Rahul Subramanian came to mind. We saw all his LinkedIn posts, noticed the quality of engagement, good reach and quickly got in touch. His background in brand management really helped his case here as well.
Rahul was sold the moment we told him, “We are okay with you reviewing and shitting on the product.” He said, “A brand has never come to me asking for this.”
Our aim was not to impress or convert users, our aim was very targeted — hire tech talent quickly, effectively, efficiently. No other reason why the whole tech team in the company was mobilised for the 2 hours when the campaign went live. To keep filtering out applications and not miss a thing.
Rahul gave us a lot of confidence with his fervour for the idea (as against sometimes when an influencer is ready to do anything for monies! *pun intended*). You could see it on his face and hear it on his audio notes when he was suggesting ideas. Loved the involvement, Rahul!
The brief was indeed brief: to ‘review the product and talk openly about what it lacks, ending with a call-to-action for hiring’. How he wanted to execute this, the ball was in his court.
One brainstorming call with Rahul and his team, and we already had a couple of (potentially) winning ideas:
- LinkedIn Interview Video
- LinkedIn text post series (something none of could visualise except Rahul and we had our doubts)
Thanks to Harsh, co-founder InVideo, we picked up the conversation with Rahul again after a whole month of procrastination, which I think worked in our favour.
Procrastination in creativity = best ideas sometimes (says Adam Grant, not me)
Clearly, Harsh who was also spending sleepless nights on checking things off from the list of his endless tech to-dos wanted to do this quickly. So thanks to him, we got on yet another call with Rahul and team to finalise what we were going to do and why.
After the second call, we rationalised 2 for the following three reasons —
- We had seen no brand leveraging the ‘edit feature’ of LinkedIn the way Rahul was suggesting.
- We all know of the commenting algorithm on LinkedIn and the plan included Sanket replying to Rahul’s edits on his post.
- It was less effort and more value from all ends — at least that was the guesstimate.
Believe it or not, Rahul foresaw exactly how the campaign would unfold one edit at a time with the comments of his followers. He would put out a LinkedIn post that would seem like a promotional post for InVideo, it would irritate his followers and soon, he would start adding edits as a frustrated user.
Finally, there would be a call-to-action that again looked promotional. Between all of this, it was the reaction of his followers and Sanket that the campaign was dependent upon.
It took all of a week to plan this — Harsh shared a list of features with Rahul, Rahul scripted, we discussed the date and time and voila. And we were ready to get this show on the road!
And it happened. Every follower was left supremely confused till the end, but that’s what got us all the attention. Especially the attention of the candidates we were looking for. The following is just the data from the first day:
Here is exactly how the action unfolded on 28 October 2020 between 10 and 11.30 am IST (watch the video on the LinkedIn post — it’s more than worth it). It also happens to be our first most engaged-with post on LinkedIn:
It was a blessing to work with Rahul on this, he gave real-time updates of the numbers through the couple of days we got reactions on the post. I lost count on the number of times Rahul said to me and I said to the team that day — “This is exactly what we wanted.”
As we continue to garner interactions on our #hiring post, we thought we should share the story of how this magic happened.
We received a lot of organic coverage by media companies calling it the “coolest hiring campaign”. Unexpected, but blissful.
Hiring + Branding happened for us successfully through this campaign, for a price of one.
