Comics

Key word of any kind of advertisement is AIDA i.e. attention, interest, desire, and action. To attract potential customers (in our case candidates) company must first of all make its advertisement visible. After getting the attention of potential customer/candidate, you must make them interested of the product/job so that they would desire it so badly and make their purchase/apply for the job.

Key question what each company who hires, should ask from itself is ‘how do I differentiate from other employers?’ If several companies are hiring to the same job and using the same channels, then the question is: ‘how do I get the candidate attention so that they would notice us first?’

Today my post is about usage of COMICS in job advertisement. An example that Proekspert (software engineering Company in Estonia) has used to recruit Java developers.

This time I used help of experts (all IT Specialists or Managers in their thirties) to help me with translation of the comic from ‘IT’ language ‘to my’ language.

I asked the experts to explain to me what this comic is about (hereinafter I am using the first names of experts). Kaupo: ‘generally speaking, the idea of this comic is following – wizard who supposedly means code wizard (very skillful programmer) claims that he could hex the cat or its meow’. Andrus: ‘it is play of words, meaning of word ‘hex’ here means hexadecimal or base 16 – programmers know what it means’. Kristina: ‘reference to Japanese probably means this that non-experts think that hex format is written in Japanese letters’.

If you are interested to find out what the code means you can use the converter and try to find the answer.

The other things that I asked from experts were, (1) how do they feel about job advertisement in form of comic and (2) what do they think of a non-traditional job ad with limited data. Though generally most of them said that they would prefer traditional job ads, they pointed out following.

Raivo: ‘I agree that probably for Java Developer job, advertisement doesn’t need to have a long list of duties since the jobs are basically the same in all companies and probably they plan to introduce different work related projects during the interview. Proekspert is well known company in local market which means that there is also no need to its description’. Kristina added from her side: ‘it seems that they are looking for younger specialists who know Harry Potter /…/ Specialists who are extroverts, who still have sparkle in their eyes, who joy playing games and read comics’. Andrus also pointed out ‘you need to know what this comic means and understand the joke in here, if you do so, then probably you are a right person for the job’.

I also took a look at Proekspert’s homepage to see whether they have more information available there – but turned out that the job ad there was the same as in job portal.

People who’d like to apply for vacant position should fill the application form, where they are supposed to enter only their name, age and contact data, additionally to coolest project that they have run and first steps in programming + hobbies.

So Kristina’s claim, that they are looking for playful candidates, gets confirmed here, with the questions about hobbies and video. It is not common approach (at least here in Estonia) to have question about hobbies on job application as a mandatory to answer. I can only assume that they ask it to find out whether the candidate suits to the team or not. The video clip is something that gives overview to the candidate, showing the potential coworkers and working environment.

If you feel that you want to do something good then Proekspert lets you catch two birds with one stone. Firstly, you can recommend your friend for the job (and he/she would probably be happy since it seems interesting job) and, secondly, Proekspert will make a donation to Tallinn Zoo to help them to feed jungle cat.

Actually it is not the first time to use comics in advertisements. In 40s and 50s the usage of advertisement in form of comic was fairly widespread. Here is an example of a breakfast cereal ad from www.craced.com.

Takeaways:

1. Recruitment is marketing! Do be different doesn’t need to mean that you need to copy innovative solutions that others have used in their recruitment ads. I recommend you to take a look to marketing and find different solutions what companies have used to advertise their products and service: copy from them and you’ll be different!
2. Find out what have been some earlier advertisement trends, I encourage you to revive a forgotten form and use it in your job ad as Proekspert has so cleverly done.
3. Offer recommendation incentives to person who helps you to find suitable employee. There are different bonuses that employers have offered in past, for examples money, iPad, donation, etc.