Creative job advertisements – 6 examples that will inspire you

Let’s be honest: job advertisements rarely shine through creativity.

Although most advertisements are informative, they are often structured in a monotonous manner along the lines of “We are looking for… your tasks… your profile… we offer…”.

The question arises: What characterizes the rare, original job offers?

We have looked at various examples and use them to show what is important when designing creative job advertisements.

GRAPHICS DESIGNER Job Twitter photo, hiring.

— City of Los Angeles – Jobs (@Citylajobs) January 18, 2018

Graphic designers wanted! This job advertisement from the City of Los Angeles intentionally looks like it was created by an amateur using Microsoft Paint. It made numerous graphic designers smile, retweeting the post and humorously applying for it with self-made images in the same style.

The funny ad with the unusual design went viral and received more than 65,000 likes on Twitter.

When furniture giant Ikea opened a new store, it included "assembly instructions for your own career" in the packaging of several products. Visually, these are reminiscent of a typical Ikea product manual. If you follow the instructions, starting a career at the Swedish furniture store is as easy as assembling a Billy shelf.

With this innovative campaign, Ikea received 4,200 applications and hired 280 new employees. And the company had no expenses for placing an advertisement on external channels and at the same time created a completely new media channel.

Senior Creative Director Frank Ippolito wishes he had thought of this mathematical @Google recruitment campaign: Senior Creative Director Frank Ippolito Senior Creative Director Frank Ippolito

— OH Partners (@OHAdvertising) August 6, 2017

Anyone who could decipher the code on this billboard was one of the programmers Google was looking for. After deciphering the code, they were taken to a landing page with another task. If the programmer successfully mastered this task, they were asked by Google to personally introduce themselves to the company.

This Recruiting campaign combines an employment test with an application and could not have been better tailored to the target group.

You might also be interested in: Google & HR: How to succeed in recruiting with the No. 1 search engine

Master glazier Sterz's video about the apprentice search on Facebook was a viral hit - it was viewed over 4 million times.

The clip arouses the viewer's curiosity right from the start through the pane of glass that shatters into thousands of pieces. In addition to the detailed job description, the authenticity of the master glazier is particularly noteworthy. This alone gives candidates an idea of the working culture in the company. A few months later, Glaserei Sterz published a video introducing the new trainees. In other words: the search for trainees via Facebook clip was a complete success.

Brandenburg Radio is looking for a jack of all trades, if you read more closely, you mean editors. With the unusual, prominently placed job title and the image of the fantasy farm animal "jack of all trades", the reader's attention is guaranteed.

The title is humorous and reflects a "relaxed" atmosphere among colleagues at BB Radio, but can also be understood to mean that the expectations placed on the editors are high and that this is communicated honestly from the outset: After all, the "jack of all trades" is a person who is expected to meet a wide range of requirements at the same time.

Don’t mention the “M”!!!
Clever job advertisement by Burger King. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/kgw10UWkDf

— Marketing Birds (@marketing_birds) April 17, 2017

Burger King and McDonalds are known to not like each other very much. The two fast food chains have long been bitter rivals, and have often taken swipes at each other in marketing clips and campaigns.

The taunts can also be found in a job advertisement. Burger King has advertised for a “Marketing Manager”. The “M” is missing here to understand that this is (M)marketing (M)anager should feel addressed. The letter was deliberately left out because the “M” is known to be the logo of McDonalds. Accordingly, the advert also says “Don`t mention the M”.

Whether with humor, unusual designs, new formats or simply with authenticity: There are many ways to design creative job advertisements. The examples show that in favor of creative design, SEO optimization measures such as keywords and the like are omitted. As we can see, this does not affect the success of the ads - they go viral even without great rankings, simply because of their uniqueness and originality.

Despite all the creative freedom, one should not forget that humor in particular has its limits. In the past, there have often been "unusual" job advertisements in a negative sense, for example with racist or sexist content.

Also read: How to recruit without discrimination