What happens when someone hires from social media? JobStreet PH pokes fun at it with these ads

Manila, Philippines – With companies actively doing background checks when hiring someone, viewing someone’s social media can get confusing for employers. With some potential applicants still hiding under anonymity, employers often have less transparency to look into as to what type of individual their next employee is.

And that is exactly what the latest ads from JobStreet Philippines show: instead of relying on social media for hiring, companies can get ‘real talent’ by visiting the JobStreet platform.

The ads, conceptualised by local creative agency GIGIL, feature a series of hilarious situations when an employer interviews someone from social media. Instead of a real person, they interview a fictional character, an avatar, or even the whole family of the applicant.

For Soleil Badenhop, associate creative director at GIGIL, humour has been an integral part of most of their campaigns, even for a formal brand such as JobStreet.

“Hiring can be really taxing for HR managers. We wanted to come up with content that would break the monotony and entertain them, get their attention while getting the message across clearly,” Badenhop said in an exclusive statement to MARKETECH APAC.

When asked how GIGIL came up with the idea for these ads, she said that while the brief for the ad was to simply market the service for free to HR managers, they wanted to dig deeper into the insights from HR managers to conceptualise the ads.

“We dug deep for true insight and found that HR managers still hire largely on social media simply because the Philippines is still the social media capital of the world. The funny thing about hiring on social media is, you don’t know whom you’re talking to because most profiles use cartoon pictures, avatars, group pictures, and fictional characters. By showing the reality of hiring there, we were able to push JobStreet as the reliable yet free option for hirers,” Badenshop told MARKETECH APAC.

Meanwhile, Kim Martin Viray, country head of marketing at JobStreet Philippines told MARKETECH APAC that aside from promoting said service to HR managers, the overarching objective of the ads was about addressing unstructured hiring, particularly on social media, where it is prone to scams and fraud.

“We have seen ads with humour and lightness to engage better with Filipino audiences, especially on digital. Our ‘Hire With Real Talent for Free’ campaign is one of the first-ever hyperlocal ad creatives we’ve produced for JobStreet Philippines, fronting our employer franchise that is emotive and targets real situations of HR professionals when hiring on social media,” the company told MARKETECH APAC.

They added, “Specifically, the already-heavy and often stressful situation of an SME hirer and then only to get low-quality candidates. To resonate more with the target audience, we re-imagined that situation lightly and with humour while highlighting our key message on what JobStreet can deliver better.”