8 Unusual Places to Advertise Your Job Vacancy (Part 2)

That's not a valid work email account. Please enter your work email (e.g. you@yourcompany.com)
Please enter your work email
(e.g. you@yourcompany.com)

Bic Car The competition for talent is such that if you want to be a serious player in the war for talent you need a combination of brute force marketing through traditional channels and a mix of some creative, out-of-the box marketing techniques to reach your desired audience.

In the first part of this article, we looked at four unusual places to advertise your jobs, which were:

  1. On people’s faces
  2. On employees’ cars
  3. Highway billboards
  4. Within online video games

In the second part of this article, we will look at four more unusual locations to advertise your job vacancy:

1. On people’s houses. Now this may sound a little “off the wall”, but it’s actually pretty much ‘on the wall’. Yes, a couple of years ago, Adzookie.com created a totally on the wall advertising campaign where they offered to paint an advert on the front of someone’s house in exchange for mortgage payments, for anything up to a year, which is kind of cheap if you compare it to how much it would cost to advertise on a billboard for a year. (This deal is over now, by the way).

Maybe this could work in the employer branding and job advertising world. Why not target houses in locations which you know your target market will go past, e.g. on busy main roads in commuter country? Clearly, you’d need to add some degree of irony and humor to pull this off, but I am sure there is an ad agency out there that could give it a go.

2. Graffiti.Yes, it seems that nothing is sacred. Even the counter-culture, sub culture, punk beast that is graffiti can be tamed by corporate functionalism. Now, I am not suggesting that you start paying youths on street corners to go out and start spraying your employer branding message and jobs ads all around the town, as you might get in a lot of trouble. No, there are at least three agencies according to a Business Insider  who deal in Graffiti Advertising. In fact, the offerings have proliferated and you can now buy services such as: wild posting, guerrilla video projection (think of the batman symbol in the sky projection), and guerrilla street posting, in some of the coolest metropolitan areas in America. Clearly, there needs to be a lot of footfall for this to work, hence the urban locations.

3. Walking billboards.Of course, there is no such things as a walking billboard perse, just in case you were wondering, but when static billboards are attached to human beings, they do walk. Now, there are agencies out there that can develop billboards that can be attached to people’s heads. It’s like wearing a huge sign above you head. Wacky, I know, but these have extremely high visibility and could be good for advertising your employer brands or jobs at specific events, such as careers events, festivals, industry events, exhibitions, and conventions. If you wish to target a specific demographic or interest group then I think that walking billboards put in places that are sympathetic to your needs are an unusual but potentially highly effective way to get your message out.

4. Airline tray tables.A few years back Brand Connections  pioneered the idea of placing ads on airline tray tables. Airline travelers, particularly those on more business traveler-oriented flights, may be affluent, dynamic senior professionals in sales, procurement, etc. Could this be a way to target senior, extremely mobile, nomadic business travelers, expats, etc? If you are an international or national company looking for resilient business travelers as employees, could this be a good medium to advertise your employer brand message? Of course, this would be a very discerning audience and so it would need to be done right.

I’d love to hear some more ideas for unusual places to post job adverts.

By Kazim Ladimeji