Picture Yourself Working Here: How We Hacked Google Maps to Recruit Talent

Did you know you can hack google maps to bring the smartest people to your company? Check out how we did it:

People in New York City can’t live without Google Maps. The chaotic schedule of road maintenance, occasional closure of subway stations, plus the mad rush of traffic in peak hours make Google Maps a necessity of life.

Google’s search engine prioritizes the map navigation. A quick search of any business in the city would generate an entry from Google Maps as the highlight of the result page. If you work in SEO, you would understand the value of such placements. Yet except for restaurants, retails and hotels, most businesses don’t pay much attention to it.

We saw a huge opportunity to attract top talent in digital advertising to career opportunities at GroupM without spending a single dollar by hacking the Google Maps!

The key to our success? Stunning, pixel perfect 360 office panoramas!

THE WHY:

In digital advertising, Google Search rules! People fight and pay top dollars through search engine marketing and optimization to get their results at the top of Google.

Recruiting talent, especially talent in digital specialty areas such as Analytics, SEO, SEM, and Programmatic Advertising is hard. We have to find inventive ways to reach them.

Anyone who lives in New York knows that location is everything. People make big life and career decisions based on the where. And a search of the company on Google is often what people do when they look at a job opportunity.

In August 2018, the whole of GroupM (including 7 operating agencies and the holding company) moved in World Trade 3, one of the possibly the best real estate in the world. How do we leverage the great location, the amazing neighborhood, and beautiful space of the office to attract top talent, and for free?

THE HOW:

The solution? Google Maps!

We uploaded more than 80 panoramic, 360-degree, high-definition pictures of our office space to Google Maps. GroupM is a group of companies, so these were pictures of all our subsidiaries – Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Xaxis.

Some of these pictures contained a subtle call to action - “Picture Yourself Working Here” which leads to our Career Site.

To support this program, we uploaded our pictures to a VR tour platform, RoundMe. This platform works in any web browser and requires no special downloads, meaning that visitors could go on a frictionless, pixel perfect journey around our offices. To enrich this visually stunning experience, we added audio content featuring interview tips, information on team structure, culture and job openings to make it truly informative. These interactive virtual tours can be embedded on any webpage or social media platform as HTML 5 codes.

Most importantly, these tours on RoundMe can be viewed as truly immersive experience on VR headsets like Oculus Go. Our entry level hiring team brings the headsets to college career fairs so prospective employees are immersed in the place where their career could begin. Those who miss the career fairs can simply use a weblink to access the tours.

As a final part of this integrated campaign to showcase our space, we took a leaf out of the MTV Cribs playbook, and created professional video tours led by various agency employees to give a more in-depth view of each company.

THE PROOF:

The result speaks for itself!

If you search for “Media Investment Agencies NYC” you will find GroupM at the top the list. Our 360 photos have generated more than 56,000 unique impressions and are now generating an average of 6000 views every single week. Our virtual tours on RoundMe have been taken 4,100 times (excluding views on VR headsets). These are just the basic metrics we could track. Most importantly, the 360 content has proved to be valuable assets in our hiring efforts. We embed them in our job ads, on our LinkedIn and Facebook posts and pages, on the company websites, and in our interview invites.

Meanwhile, our competitors have made zero effort to distinguish themselves via Google Maps. Some of them have very drab looking photos, others have no photos at all – making this a unique point of difference for GroupM.

So far, this effort has resulted in a couple of hires based on our survey results. And all this at zero dollars. The pictures will be there forever and so Google will continue to serve our branded recruitment marketing asking people to: "Picture Yourself Working Here".

Can you picture yourself working here? We hope so. See where you fit in: http://bit.ly/2Uae3ET

Видео Picture Yourself Working Here: How We Hacked Google Maps to Recruit Talent канала GroupM Global Talent Hub