How Fiverr went viral on LinkedIn with ridiculous job titles

The recession’s got us talking about the tough job market, but companies aren’t exactly having a ball finding the right talent, either. All those gifted employees affected by lay-offs are scrolling LinkedIn, perusing postings with bland job titles and blander job descriptions, clicking into the sexy companies instead of jobs they might enjoy a whole lot more.

That’s why Fiverr started looking for an Unnecessary Brainstorm Escape Artist Who’s also a Product Designer.

When everyone zigs, you zag

“Hacking the platform” is a common desire in social media strategy. The idea’s simple enough: use a native social platform feature in an unexpected way to generate results. That’s when someone inevitably makes a “should our brand start an OnlyFans?” joke (no, you shouldn’t, the only good brand OnlyFans came from the Vienna Tourism Board).

Fiverr sought to hack LinkedIn job postings, a unit that rarely goes deeper than a job title, company logo, and location. Normally plain language is the right move—candidates have specific titles in mind & want clarity in their job hunt—but if everyone’s doing the same thing, a little creativity goes a long way. That’s why Fiverr changed their job vacancies to:

It’s silly fun, but let’s make sure to recognize the tactical smarts, too. If Fiverr just posted “Someone who doesn’t like office politics” as the full title, it’d have been a huge miss—they wouldn’t have attracted the right talent. The format of “[insert office witticism] who’s also a [actual job title]” ensured the company’s posting still appeared in key word searches for the right talent.

Turning your employees into influencers

Companies have such interesting relationships with their employees’ public presences. Some orgs wisely allow workers to be loud & proud about their gigs, like my pals at Morning Brew with the coffee emoji in Twitter handles. Others try to bury individuals, like a video game publisher I worked with who asked my whole agency to never post about our work (gave us some archaic line about no one ever taking individual credit as a culture thing).

Fiverr clearly wants their staff to be in on the gags, so they built a bot that generated fake job titles for their current team, then encouraged them to update their LinkedIn profiles.

It’s such a smart extension of the campaign for a handful of reasons.

• Whether it’s due to LinkedIn’s algorithm or because it’s the professional equivalent of baby pics, new job announcements get a ton of engagement on LinkedIn + one of these silly clipart visuals.

• Besides the extended reach, it’s just fun for employees. Who wouldn’t wanna make a fake job title for a day? It’s almost as much a retention bit as a recruitment tactic.

• Happy employees = more referrals.

Big results

Boy, did this campaign work. Take a look at these numbers.

• 357 Fiverr employees changed their job titles, generating ~2.6 million views

• 91.84% increase in visits to Fiverr’s career page

• 43% increase in # of applicants year-over-year

• Every single job was filled

Pretty damn hard to build a program that excites your current team, makes them feel appreciated, and generates your intended results. It’s truly a 10/10, no notes, award-worthy moment from Fiverr. They’re my pick to win the LinkedIn category at this year’s Shorty Awards.