R/ga: The Social Interview

Credits & Description:

Category: Titanium and Integrated
Advertiser: R/GA
Product/Service: THE SOCIAL INTERVIEW
Agency: R/GA
Date of First Appearance: Mar 4 2011
Entry URL: http://internships.rga.com/
Associate Creative Director, Interaction Design: Joo Youn Paek (R/GA)
Senior Interaction Designer: Andrew Mercando (R/GA)
Junior Copywriter: Morgan Doff (R/GA)
Copy Intern: Will Binder (R/GA)
Associate Creative Director, Visual Design: Leif Abraham (R/GA)
Associate Creative Director, Visual Design: Christian Behrendt (R/GA)
Visual Intern: Jared White (R/GA)
Senior Technical Director: Keath Chan (R/GA)
Open Standards Developer: Andrei Rosca (R/GA)
Producer: Christina Guarino (R/GA)
Media placement: Website - www.internships.rga.com - March 4, 2011
Media placement: Facebook Walls - Facebook - March 4, 201

Describe the campaign/entry
Ever Googled yourself? Your prospective employers are doing the same—and checking out your tweets, status updates, and photos. Of course, you’re most likely finding out about them too. The age of social media demands transparency. It also presents opportunities for those fluent in the rules of the game.
We wanted to try a new kind of job interview: The Social Interview. Through the power of the crowd, The Social Interview paints a more complete picture of a candidates’ skill set, and created a more insightful and informed way for companies to find the best match.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched across each channel in the order of implementation
Here’s how it works. We asked summer internship candidates to allow us to post three questions to their Facebook wall—not for them to answer, but for their friends to answer. It was a test, to see who could rally their social networks and it gave us a more complete picture of the candidates than the traditional approach of just interviewing them individually. It can be easy to bend the truth in a one-on-one interview, it’s not so easy to convince your friends to do it in public, where everyone can see and comment.
With thousands of answers posted, we discovered some of the youngest, social media savvy minds around.

Give some idea of how successful this campaign/entry was with both client and consumer
In the end, The Social Interview showed us just how much a résumé leaves unsaid, and what social media holds for the future of recruiting.