Based on the insight that most designers are looking for pirated alternatives to expensive design software, Ogilvy Brussels recently recruited a web designer through a piracy website.
They uploaded the job description disguised as a design-application suite on various pirated file-sharing websites. When web designers downloaded the file, they discovered the job-posting followed by this message – “We’ll provide you all the applications you need, apply now”. Check out the case study below.
This does beg the following questions:
- More often that not, users on piracy websites download files that are heavily seeded. We doubt the number of seeders for a fake file like this would be really high.
- Users can always view comments on download pages on most pirated websites. Weird that no one commented on this particular download.
- Design applications suites are usually a few GBs in size. It’s hard to believe that Ogilvy created a surprise package more than a few KBs or MBs and the “talented” web designer fell for downloading an entire software suite that ‘light’ in size.
What are your views on this hiring strategy? Let us know in the comments section below.