Kudos

This week, the employee manual at Valve (makers of Half-Life 2, Portal, and other super-successful games) was leaked online.

It makes us want to work there.

Employees choose the projects they want to work on. You’ve heard of 20% time? Valve is “100% time”. There aren’t any bosses, per se, but people “in charge” (which seems to be a loose term at Valve) discourage overtime.

Not to mention the usual perks like free food, games tables, massages, etc.

Good gravy.

This could explain why Valve could be worth billions, and its profit-per-employee is higher than Google or Facebook.

The manual‘s authenticity was confirmed by Doug Lombardi, Valve’s vice president of marketing.

By the way. If you really don’t want to learn to code (okay, us neither), there are a few openings posted for media types, including one for an artist, a film editor, and sound engineer. And the company hires two to three new people each month, so if you don’t see anything you like right now, check back. Expect heavy competition (duh).

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Okay, so it happened nearly a century ago, but it’s still a great cover letter—and one that writer Robert Pirosh didn’t customize, but instead mass-mailed to as many employers as he could think of.

Pirosh had just returned to New York (by way of a year in Europe) and was hoping to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

Here’s what he wrote, via Letters of Note:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024

Everybody is talking about Dollar Shave Club, the site that launched on Tuesday and promises to send you a month’s supply of razor blades for a buck plus shipping.

The premise is sexy enough that that fact alone might have grabbed them plenty of new business, but we’re betting the hilarious promo video didn’t hurt.

It feels Old Spice-y (more tennis, fewer horses) but cost $4500 to make.

On the first day, Business Insider says, the site crashed from interest. Dollar Shave Club still managed to sign up 5,000 subscribers that day, which was Tuesday. Now they’re up to 12,000.

CEO Michael Dubin told BI:

The wonderful thing about Dollar Shave Club is that we get to tell a unique story these days and build a unique brand because we’re on the internet and because the rules are different there.
We can be irreverent, but we can be direct. If you look at the video, we are communicating the whole time the product and service benefits. We’re talking about product and pricing. We’re talking about convenience. Yes, there’s a couple of jokes that don’t talk about the business there, but our goal with creating the video was to teach people about our business. And give them a laugh at the same time and that’s going to make them remember it more. I don’t see humor as a conflict. I see it as a vehicle to communicate those same points that other people are doing in a very dry way.

Is there a line that you can cross and it becomes too funny? No I don’t think you can be too funny, but I think you can get too sloppy, but we’re never going to get sloppy. We’re always going to be very communicative with our customer about their product benefits. I’m sure we’ll make mistakes along the line and we’ll be very direct about that as well.

Buying your razors doesn’t have to be a boring, humorless experience. In my opinion nothing should be a boring, humorless experience. If I can make five minutes out of everybody’s month an enjoyable five minutes and they get a great shave on the other end of that, then I’m really happy and I’ve done my job.

For more about this startup, read the interview. Just a reminder that a really slick-looking video can have a huge impact with not very much money.

Here’s a Tuesday evening moment of Zen (can we say that?): a wannabe art director’s “hire me” video. Can someone give her a job if only to ensure that this song never happens again?

Looking for… a job. from Fernanda Roedel on Vimeo.

In all seriousness, major props for having the balls (figuratively) to put this out there.

Dallas-based The Marketing Arm, a marketing and promotions company, is offering a fairly big chunk of cash to anyone who’s been with the company 7 years or more.

According to the Dallas Morning News the company has recently announced that anyone who’s been with the company for seven years will get seven days off and $2,500 to do something crazy they’ve never had the time or money for. Employees with 15 years of service will get 15 days off and $5,000.

The program will cost between $125,000 and $200,000 each year, depending on how many people take the offer.

The catches:

The days have to be taken in one chunk. The time and money must be used to do something personally rewarding or something that betters the lives of others. A four-person review committee approves proposals.

About 50 staffers qualify this year (including those who’ve already passed a seven- or 15-year milestone). Some of the things they’ve planned:

Travis Dillon, director of property management, wants to go to surfing camp in Costa Rica.
Stu Hill, senior conceptor (that’s someone who creates marketing concepts), wants to travel to India for a meditation retreat.
Michelle Palmer, senior vice president, wants to learn how to paint at an art school in Sedona, Ariz.

The Marketing Arm is a part of Omnicom and counts AT&T, Frito-Lay, American Airlinesand GameStop among its clients.

It’s always nice to see media pros put something together that just blows up.

And that’s what happened when Jesse Rosten, who has spent the last eight years producing commercials for local businesses, put a parody ad up for a fake beauty product called “Fotoshop by Adobé”.

Here’s the video:

On Youtube, the video has 2.2 million views, plus another 3.4 million views on Vimeo.

All for a shoot that, Rosten told the blog A Photo Editor, was made by all volunteers and donated equipment. The biggest expense, Rosten said, was buying food for everyone on the day of the shoot.

“My inbox has been a mess—a lot of inquiries and interest. I haven’t turned it into any paying gigs yet, but now I feel like I can justify putting time and resources into this,” he said. Meanwhile, he doesn’t find it all that surprising that he was able to go viral on such a low budget: that has “always been my thing because I haven’t had a lot of resources. One of the things I like most about filmmaking is creative problem solving—whether that’s coming up with a creative story or coming up with a creative way to make due with few resources. Right now I feel like I can do anything with a camera and a few worklights.”

Among all the “X company should hire me” websites and social campaigns, Daniel Hebert‘s stands out for being the least gimmicky we’ve seen in a while.

In a blog post called, simply, Why I Should Work For Radian6, the Mount Allison University senior wrote about why he likes the company and what his skills are.

Essentially, it’s less of a marketing campaign and more of a really long cover letter with some images and links thrown in.

Here’s a sample:

In order to engage with your followers, you need to know when your community is most active. So I did a full analysis of my Twitter account, using different tools, to figure out what were the optimal times for me to share content with my community. I compiled the data, analysed it, and came up with results for when to best share curated content, re-tweets, and my own blog content.

And it has worked well for me so far! I always measure my results that I found from my analysis and make sure it is consistent with my findings.

I do all of that on my own spare time. I don’t sell a product or a service, I don’t get online revenues from ads and such. The only reason I do this is for the sole purpose of my own education (and for fun, of course!). I think it’s very important to invest in myself, and I believe that this learning experience has thought me extremely valuable skills that are in high demand in the social media and marketing industry nowadays

According to Ragan.com, he heard from Radian6 within 24 hours and had a phone interview earlier this week.

Of course, getting a company’s attention through a campaign or blog post like this is only the first step, and Hebert will need to back up his enthusiastic online presentation with a great phone (and in-person, perhaps) game. But he’s definitely on the right track.

We’re posting this as a counterpoint to the more flashy campaigns we’ve covered in the past, which can certainly work if done well but aren’t necessary, if you don’t feel your strength lies in that area.

Here’s one way to get someone’s attention: look at the back of this business card from ad agency JWT London through smartphone app Blippar and up pops the agency’s work. Very cool.

Blippar is free to download to view other “blipps,” but making your own AR business card…is another story.

Watch the presentation above.

It’s a pretty amazing resume, right?

This is what Hanna Phan created when she saw an opening at SlideRocket, the company that allows people to make these presentations.

In other words, Phan used the company’s own software to show why she would make a great hire.

“I was looking for a typical job and when the going gets tough and you don’t get any bites from the traditional way of looking for a job, sending out your resume, submitting it to HR portals, and you don’t get the response you want, I was pretty fed up and decided I had to do something pretty radically different,” she told MJD.

The details of her story have already made it across the Web, including on SlideRocket’s own blog, so we’ll be brief: after creating the presentation, she Tweeted it to Chuck Dietrich, the company’s CEO. As soon as he got off a plane, he replied to her, they chatted on the phone, and she had the job. The company now even offers “Présumé” templates for people who want to try this approach themselves.

After speaking with Phan today, here’s why we think this approach worked so well:

• Phan is no entry-level candidate. Though her presentation doesn’t go into details, she has a computer science background and years of work experience, including nearly three years as a freelance presentation consultant (which surely explains why she was able to pull together this presentation).
• She researched the company thoroughly. If you weren’t super-familiar with SlideRocket, you might have thought that the line Phan used—”I want to work with you and change the world, one presentation at a time” was incredibly cheesy. But, wouldn’t you know it, that happens to be the company’s philosophy. “I did a lot of research on their culture, about how they talk about their presentations,” Phan told MJD. To Sliderocket? Not cheesy at all.
• She spent a hell of a lot of time on it. “From start to finish, it was three weeks from when I saw the job posting to the day I sent it out,” she says (but thankfully for all jobseekers whose jaws are dropping right now, two of those three weeks were brainstorming). Still. Most people talk about spending an hour on a cover letter. One freelancer we know spends about a half day on each gig application, and we thought that was a long time. A week!

The jury’s out on whether Presumes will work on the strength of just their design skills, rather than the cleverness Phan hit on of applying to the presentation company. That seems to have been the secret sauce here, though on the bright side, Sliderocket is still hiring. And besides, these things aren’t video resumes.

So, Carrot Creative, a social media agency, is hiring a community manager. The job ad said “boring cover letters are not necessary.”

So Torrey Taralli made a video cover letter using 300 carrots to spell out his cover letter and qualifications. “My hands were orange at the end,” he says in the video description.

It’s clever, we think (though you can judge for yourself below) but it turns out that it’s hard to write long sentences with carrots. (Who knew?) At the end of the video we just wanted to know more about Taralli’s qualifications….though perhaps the hiring managers at Carrot will be curious enough to check Taralli out.

One thing’s for sure: it’s not a boring cover letter.