Creative, but it could be done so much better. Improve the copy a bit and send them to a landing page which functions as a combination pitch and portfolio.
(Psst -- if you're on the job market, have one of those. And since most of you here can program, have a way to quickly spin up ones targeted to the interests of a particular decisionmaker. )
I'm used to seeing people search results there when I search for names, so I'd probably skip over it. There's got to be something more attention grabbing than "Hey, $NAME".
I toyed around with the idea of using Google AdWords, but couldn't quite figure out how to get the targeting right. This just made me smack my forehead. For most job seekers this idea is a lot harder to implement than the Facebook idea just because you often don't know whom you want to talk to about landing a job with a given company.
Still, this has me thinking of all kind of ways that you can use AdWords to target really niche keywords. The clicks probably cost a nickel, but the attention derived from that click could be way more.
How often do these guys google themselves? My mean time between self-googling's can be months... seems like there would be the potential for months to pass before hearing anything.
That's even better, because you've just leaped up the trust totem pole from "A nobody on the Internet" to "a warm introduction from a trusted associate."
Presumably creative directors are a particularly vain sort, and likely given the type of self-promotion required to be successful in that sort of job, the most successful are likely the most vain.
Given they're top names within their industry, they might have staff checking the search results quite frequently to ensure that competitors aren't showing ads against their names. Something like this then gets flagged up as something for the boss to see.
Given his target market, I think this was a great way to get an interview.
And what do people look for when they google themselves? What do you find that's interesting?
I have the same name as a celebrity, so I can't have this feature. (it's not Michael Bolton).
you can set up google alerts that notify you of changes to the results of a search. And people in some industries care very much about what's said about them.
I've tried hiring using Google Ads with keywords relevant to some advanced techs we use and if you are in my country, you get an ad. It didn't help much with our immediate hiring needs but it worked better as brand advertisement - it generated some discussions and I believe it did help us hiring later.
That'd be a great answer to YC's application question "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
Granted it still involved a computer, but I'm sure they'd agree it was a great example.
So this is a cool idea, but since the video was just some text and two screenshots, couldn't he have made a blog post instead of making me load a video?
Hmm ... wondering how frequently do people google themselves "as compared to other people googling for them". The ratio will be even smaller for famous people.
It can be debated that the others will not click on the link. Or that people actually google themselves more often than I think. Just a thought.
