With the current employment situation in Denmark where great employees are hard to find I often wonder how little effort is put in to recruiting new people for important positions.

I once spoke with a sales manager who told me that the difference between an average sales-person and a great sales-person is 20 to 1. If this is true, there should be no boundaries on how much you are willing to spend on having a great sales-person on your team as supposed to having an average or even good person on your team.

The gaming company Red 5 has made a recruitment campaign that is likely to have a near 100% response rate (at least in as far as getting in touch, if not necessarily accepting the position).

Red 5 figured out that if they had to steal the best gaming developers from their competition they had to a little more than to put the average job description on monster.com

They FedExed boxes to the people that they wanted to hire. Inside the box was… a smaller box and inside that box was a smaller box… and so on. If you put all the boxes together the puzzle would say:

not the end
a beginning
a new beginning
not a new world
but an old world
made new
no change is peaceful
and though life struggles
it also strives
to forge a new path
through the darkness
to rise to the call of glory
not the end
a new beginning
with new eyes to greet it.

Inside box number five (which was red) is a tiny iPod shuffle, nestled in more protective foam, with a name engraved on it; the name of the intended recipient. Printed on the inside flap of the box is an invitation to listen to a pre-recorded track on the iPod itself.

“You’ve got a passion for detail and a flair for gameplay that we admire very much,” Mark says, addressing the person by name. “At Red 5, we’re assembling a team of incredibly talented individuals dedicated to pushing the envelope.” He then suggests this person may be just what Red 5 is looking for and describes how they may go about logging on to the company website to learn more.

I can imagine that pile of high quality resumes are piling up on the desk at Red 5 and my guess is that they are more worth than a pile of iPod shuffles.

A blogpost from a guy who recieved the box
Red 5 explains why they did it
An other blogpost from someone who recieved the box