• by Larissa Faw , January 10, 2016

It takes more than traditional employment ads or LinkedIn postings to find talent these days, which is why Horizon Media has created a video parody of Adele's “Hello” in order to find a new Mobile Supervisor. 

The video features several different Horizon employees doing their best Adele imitations as they sing rewritten lyrics to explain the agency’s culture. For instance, the song begins with "We’re in New York and Cali dreaming of the team that we could be. When you join us, you will see. That you’d forgotten how it feels to have awards fall at your feet. There’s such a difference between us and a million mobile jobs." 

“We take creative cues from the groups within Horizon that we work with so that our content authentically represents the team’s sense of humor,” says Nando Rodriquez, director of talent branding and candidate experience, Horizon Media. “The mobile team approached us with the initial idea of doing the Adele song. We wanted to shake things up and create a parody that would not only resonate with candidates interested in working at Horizon but also convey that our mobile team itself is quirky and fun.”

The goal is to stand out in a competitive market in order to appeal to top talent.  “Mobile talent is in demand and we want to attract the best people by positioning ourselves creatively and highlighting what makes Horizon such a great place to work," says Sarah Bachman, VP, mobile strategy, Horizon Media. 

The concept also attracted a surprising number of internal employees eager to participate in the video. “We were truly surprised when we put out an office wide casting call asking for ‘Adele’s’ and received more than 25 replies,” said Rodriquez. “Alison Joseph, Trendsights strategist, and Lauren Rich, senior analyst, digital analytics, wrote all of the lyrics themselves, and watching their creative process was fascinating. As far as challenges go – we had to collect all of those leaves for the video by hand – not an easy feat in lower Manhattan,” says Rodriquez.

While this is the agency's first Adele video, it is actually its third recruitment video.  “While we would like to create content for every job opening, we seek to promote a wide array of open positions in our videos," says Rodriquez. The video seeking programmatic experts, for instance, was futuristic but more straight-forwarded.

It remains to be seen if the Adele video will attract a different candidate than the typical employment recruitment ad, but in under a week, it has already garnered more than 3,969 views. The programmatic ad, by comparison, only received 2,100 views.