Tweet if You Want Me Hired

The ongoing debate over the relevance and value of social media was auspiciously added to last month, with an inventive job-hunting campaign that has many observers scratching their unemployed heads. We’ve all been in the depths of a particularly nasty job hunt; blaring through job postings until they transcend our dreamscape, endlessly typing out applications from an inbox full of no-replies. So it’s been refreshing to many to hear the story of Vancouver creative Chris Kahle, who landed his dream job through a twitter campaign he devised for himself.

Coveting a creative position at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a Colorado ad agency, Chris posted a clever online job request imploring CP+B to hire him, and he invited the twitter users to help him out by re-tweeting the link to his would-be bosses Alex Bogusky and Jeff Benjamin of CP+B. As a show of good faith, he committed himself to donate $1 to charity for the first 200 tweets.

A couple weeks later with 80 tweets sent on his behalf, his project site had received 10,000 visitors and he found himself accepting the position he had so desired at CP+B. What’s more, he started a whole twitter debate over his campaign, with hundreds of commenters responding and giving their opinion. Predictably, the spectrum was represented from those who felt compelled to denounce him and all he stood for, to those who thought it was clever and fun, and probably a few people who didn’t quite get it.

The real success was that it managed to ignite conversation, which gave it legs to spread far and wide, and garner attention. It’s a perfect example of how the collective intelligence of the online community can be harnessed for a focussed goal, and how decentralized communication modes are beginning to blaze trails through the conventional mediums and their power bases. Now if only I had thought of it.