When Hiring Is About Wordplay "Very few companies in India work in the video domain. It is a pain point for us to find such people who are passionate about videos and want to work with a startup doing business around videos"

Subrat Kar went head-hunting in the market to find people who can watch "cat videos in dazzling 4k-8k resolution for a whole day' at his Noida-based video marketing and analytics start-up Vidooly but he just couldn't get the job done. "The online job post for 15 days could only fetch three or four applications," says Kar. So, he stopped "wasting' his time, money and efforts in doing that and started learning the psyche of job seekers to find a way out.

Vidooly serves as the video intelligence platform for media companies, online content creators, multichannel networks and anyone around the video ecosystem. Around two-and-a-half-year-old startup has been looking to hire video analysts to simply watch online videos and figure out the trending ones or the ones that would be go viral in 24 to 48 hours after being uploaded for Vidooly's clients to advertise on the videos that are relevant to their brand philosophy. "Very few companies in India work in the video domain. It is a pain point for us to find such people who are passionate about videos and want to work with a startup doing business around videos," adds Kar. Video Analyst as the job title failed to invite applications as it "sounded boring and people thought that it to be just another analyst job."

Twist of Words

So he thought around the craziness involved in the job profile and played on words to make it - Senior Viral Video Finder. It required candidates to have "unlimited patience to scroll Facebook, a fondness for all kinds of junk food, be a serial liker and an expert bullshitter," wrote Kar in his LinkedIn post. While Vidooly's product gave algorithms-driven prediction on the videos that are already viral or are about to, which are category and geography agnostic, but there was a problem. "Most of the adult content also gets viral in 24 hours of upload," says Kar that its algorithm failed to filter out. "So we thought that it requires human intervention to watch and analyze videos that can be given to brand managers and advertisers."

Kar ran a campaign with this funny job title. And there he was, staring at more than 300 applications in just two days of launching the campaign. Over next 13 days, he was hit by an avalanche of more than 2,000 applications in total. "We had no idea that people would be super excited about it. They thought it to be the best job in 2016," claims Kar. "Surprisingly people in different roles from corporates applied for the job. Imagine, how interesting it would be to watch Hotstar or Netflix in your day job," he asserts. Vidooly hired three people out of the campaign.

(This article was first published in the July issue of BIZ Experiences Magazine. To subscribe, click here)