Talent poaching via Facebook Places

Creativity has a new mini case study of an "innovative" recruitment program done by ad agency Jung Von Matt in Stuttgart, Germany. In the proud tradition of agencies buying competitor keywords for jobs ads, Jung Van Matt decided to do something similar, but with location-based services.

Weeks before the official Facebook Places launch in Germany, a VPN Tunnel that simulated an US IP-Address allowed Jung von Matt/Neckar to create places in Facebook. So they created places for their competitors like Neue Digitale / Razorfish (Frankfurt), Interone (Hamburg), Fork Unstable Media (Hamburg), Kolle Rebbe (Hamburg), AKQA (Berlin) and Argonauten G2 (Berlin).

This not only showed that they were faster than the others, but also raised attention for Jung von Matt/Neckar with the high profile digital creatives. So when they checked in at their agencys they received messages like:

First! Want to join? Check in at www.jvm-neckar.de/jobs, we are hiring.

Hi, from the trojan horses inside. Want to join? Check in at www.jvm-neckar.de/jobs, we are hiring.

Of course the targeted creatives also spread Jung von Matt/Neckar message to their whole networks via Facebook.