How we hacked Google Maps to recruit talent in NYC

Picture Yourself Working Here...

Recruiting talent, especially talent in digital specialty areas such as Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Programmatic Advertising is hard.

In my last post about digital talent, we learned that there are only 15,000 people with Programmatic skills in the whole USA.

Reaching them? It's something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

This audience is hard to identify, and very hard to attract and engage. Like software engineers in the valley, you'll have to find inventive and novel ways to reach them.

Taking a Birds Eye View

We decided to use Google Maps to subtly advertise to passers by in the Financial District that we were open for business, and hungry to hire talent.

On behalf of our Agencies: MediaCom, Mindshare, Wavemaker, we uploaded 55 panoramic, high-definition 360 degree shots of our wonderful new offices at 3 World Trade Center featuring our amazing space, and breathtaking views. The best thing? Some of the pics contained a subtle call to action to visit our career website to learn more.

Click the pic above and you'll get the idea. ^^^

Most of our competitors have a rather bare-bones approach to branding on Google Maps/StreetView. We understand it may not be the most obvious choice for recruitment marketing material. Here's an example of one competitor who thought that uploading a flat looking shot of their reception area might be sufficient.

Since we did this late last year, our pictures have been viewed over 42,600 times.

Tracking the impact for content like this on actual hires is pretty hard, so it's not as easy as say, a Linkedin post where you can drop pixels on visitor browsers to track their post-visit behavior.

However we do anonymously poll new hires on the media that had the most impact on their decision to apply.

So far this effort has resulted in a couple of hires. This is free. The pictures will be there forever and so Google will continue to serve our branded recruitment marketing asking people to:

"Picture Yourself Working Here"

Recruiters: Please let me know in the comments if you've ever thought about novel ways or platforms to recruit? I'd love to hear what you did with Tinder, for example.

Marketing Teams: Have you checked your presence on Google Maps/StreetView lately?

Jobseekers: Did you ever get a job through Google Maps?

One last thing to mention before I go. We don't only recruit via StreetView, we hire actual Talent Acquisition Business Partners to find great people to join us, and we're recruiting, so find out more at the link if you're interested.