Posted by: Will – Priority Juggler on June 4th, 2007

We love gumtree. We’ve recruited about 20 members of our team using the site, at a fraction of the cost of using a recruitment agency. In fact, aside from people we always knew we wanted to hire, every single other recruit has come through gumtree, including drivers, florists, customer service ladies and even our search engine optimisation expert, Adarsh!

So recently, when we were just about to kick off recruitment for an accounts assistant, we were very happy to field a call from the gumfolk themselves, asking us if we wanted to try out a new feature.

“What’s the feature?”, we asked, and the gummers pointed us to this listing, featuring two highly amusing and idiotic students in Oxford advertising for a flat mate. The feature is the ability to add a video to your listing. Hardly revolutionary, but pretty neat.

Why do it? The theory is that it should ensure that, having viewed the video, people will better understand you as a business and then decide that yes, they think they definitely want to apply for the job or no way, Arena looks rubbish, I’ll look elsewhere thanks very much. It sounded like an excellent idea and good fun to boot, so we got it all set up and before we knew it Ray, from Strip Studios,

and his ace sidekick Nico

arrived at Flowers HQ to film the video.

Given we were recruiting for someone to work with Steve, it would have been handy for him to be part of the video, but sadly he was on holiday that week. So instead we did a speedy guided tour of Flowers HQ showing all the key parts and people at Arena.

So without further ado, here’s the video that lens-wizard Ray produced:

Thoughts:
* It was great fun to do and a welcome change from the day to day for the whole team.
* We got over 100 CVs for the job, of which 60 were strong.
* We interviewed 18 people, all of whom had seen the video and found it useful in understanding Arena. They appeared to have got the message that we were trying to convey; that Arena is young, fast growing and fun.
* It was felt there was too little about the actual job and responsibilities in the vid, so we’d do more of that next time.

Was the video worth doing? Yes it was. It definitely relaxed interviewees and set discussions off on a good footing. On a practical level, it also saved us time, as we had to do less explanation about the business.

Did we fill the role? Yes we did! Take a bow, Francis, Arena’s new book-keeper. Today is Francis’ first day and, typical of the spirit of versatility that is a must at Arena, Francis is not going to spend his first day ploughing through numbers but out delivering flowers with Steve across London – we had a giant order for 450 bouquets come in recently and, at such times, it’s all hands to the pumps. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2007

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