Your Snapchat story could soon land you a job

When it comes to getting a job, it’s no longer just about your CV and a face-to-face interview. Companies are using people’s social media accounts as references and Skype interviews are commonplace.

A digital agency in the US is going beyond that and using Snapchat to hire its interns for this summer. Space150 has taken full advantage of Snapchat’s custom filters option and has created numerous versions for various college campuses and locations that it hopes will attract eager students.

Some of the universities and areas that have their own filters include NYU, the University of California and Miami Ad School. Space150 will be hiring 10 interns for each of its offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Burbank.

The filters urge the hopeful interns to follow the Space150 Snapchat channel where they will be given a task, which serves as their application.

The brief is that the students will each have to create a Snapchat story for one of the agency’s clients with the theme 2020 in mind. Those clients include Sony, Disney, Nike, Amex and many more, so these students will need to be on form, especially since Snapchat has over 100 million daily active users. Competition is likely to be stiff.

It’s not the first time a company has used Snapchat as a tool for hiring but Space150’s innovative use of the custom filters to attract its potential hires is interesting. It turns the traditional hiring path of hopeful candidates approaching the company on its head, since it is the company reaching out to a pool of people it knows would be suitable for the jobs.

Snapchat’s geofilters became available a month ago and so far, this appears to be the first use of them as a hiring tool.

How a person comes across on paper and in person or on film can be very different so combining a social element with someone’s academic and professional record is a much better approach to getting a full picture of the individual. Here’s to hoping more companies adopt this application process in the future and ditch the age-old application forms.

Via Digiday