I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [190]
A Brand-New Idea for Recruiting Engineers
Late in 2002, I received a poster in the mail. It was a montage of ads and PR stunts that had been put together to introduce the BMW Mini Cooper to the US market. Some of them made me laugh out loud. I dropped a note to the ad agency that had sent it, telling them we weren't in the market, but if they were ever in the Bay Area, I'd like to talk to them. Almost two years later, I convinced Larry and Sergey to put the agency, Crispin Porter+Bogusky, to work for us on my secret plan to do a consumer branding campaign in the guise of an effort to recruit engineers. I didn't tell Larry and Sergey the secret part. I just said we would hire an agency to help us find more technical talent, as they were desperate to do.
Advertising to engineers would be tricky. They don't like to be marketed to. I instructed the Crispin people not to tell anyone outside Google they were working on our behalf, and not to mention branding to anyone at Google. But I let them know I wanted a campaign to reinforce the positioning of Google as the world's best search engine because we had the best technology, created by the sharpest minds in the industry.
Crispin sent a team to spend a day interviewing senior engineers on our campus. A few weeks later, they came back with a presentation full of cutting edges and radiant brilliance.
They had realistic Google ID badges with pictures of real Google engineers on the front and coding challenges on the back to be solved and sent with résumés to our HR department. They planned to drop them in classrooms at top engineering schools.
They had a plan to get Google mentioned on The Simpsons.*
They had a billboard that was simply a mathematical equation followed by ".com." No logo or identification. Those who solved the equation and entered the solution as a web address would get another puzzle and ultimately a Google recruiting page.
They had a series of print ads with photos purporting to be from Google's office, where parking a car, sending a fax, or getting snacks from a vending machine required solving complex puzzles. Readers were invited to send in their solutions along with their job applications.
They had a plan to rebrand our recruiting effort as "Google labs," to emphasize we were working on much more than search, which many in our target audience considered to be an already-solved problem. To make that evident, they incorporated a handwritten "Labs" as an exponent above and to the right of our Google logo.
They proposed a "Google Labs Aptitude Test" (GLAT) to be inserted in school newspapers and magazines like Science and the MIT Technology Review.
Larry and Sergey didn't hate it. In fact, they were amused. One of the few elements they nixed was a video campaign called "Watch Your Ass," which showed gritty handheld-camera footage of Google recruiters hunting down engineering talent with dart guns and nets at their workplaces. It was too dark.
"Be careful not to upset those we don't end up hiring," was the gist of the founders' feedback. "Don't insult them if they can't solve the puzzles." For the rest, they gave the okay to go ahead. I quietly rejoiced. I had sold a branding campaign from the nation's hottest ad agency to two guys who hated anything to do with marketing. It had taken four years, but I had figured out a way to work the system.
The implementation of the campaign was almost flawless. Since challenging engineers fell outside Crispin's area of expertise, two Googlers, Curtis Chen and Wei-Hwa Huang (a four-time winner of the World Puzzle Championship), came up with most of the puzzles we used. I helped