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July 25, 2007

Careers: If Only You Could Work Here

Have you ever wandered into an office staffed by 55 employees who are mostly 24-years-old and in their first job out of college? It might be kind of fun, right?

And in this particular office above Union Square in New York City, they throw the occasional staff party billed as the "Thursday Night Hang." The workers in this firm called Connected Ventures run three pretty cool companies: a site called CollegeHumor.com; a t-shirt company called Busted Tees; and a video community site that predates YouTube called Vimeo.com.

One evening at a company party, they recorded the following video, for fun, on a single take. It wasn't intended to be a recruitment video; it just turned out that way. Note, it takes about 40 seconds or more to get grooving and some of the words in a song you will hear are mature. Don't worry, nothing else about the video is mature, it's all in fun.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from Vimeo.

There were unexpected outcomes to this exercise:

• Four million people have "viewed" this video since it was posted in May
• The video has been widely discussed on blogs around the world, including on Tech Crunch's CrunchNotes site. Many of the comments are variations of this: "I want to work there"
• In homage to Connected Ventures' groundbreaking effort, an office of Paris-based designers (Heaven.fr) recorded a lip-dub to Weezer's Sweater song. (Some say it is better, but I don't think so.)
• Résumés are streaming into Connected Ventures

"We put it on online so we could share it with friends and so people," says Ricky Van Veen, one of the founders of the company and Editor-in-Chief of CollegeHumor.com. "It didn't occur to us that anybody outside of the office would want to see it."

Amandalyn Ferri, who works in marketing at Busted Tees, has won a lot of admirers for her "performance" that marks the beginning of the video - a "lip-dub" to Harvey Danger's Flagpole Sitta. "I work here and I think that people are under the impression that as a company we all just sit around and do nothing," she says. "We definitely give off the impression that we hang out and it's like a college dorm 24x7. Realistically it's not a surprise to come back and see people working at 8 or 9 p.m."

If most of us could stop working by 9 p.m. we would be pretty happy.

"It has been such a great recruiting tool for us," says Van Veen, who performs in the video. "We saw a couple of hundred résumés just blindly. People said, 'I don't know what you do but I just want to work at your company.'" They're hiring.

Rusty Weston, My Global Career • San Francisco, Ca • http://www.myglobalcareer.com/ •

Posted by Rusty Weston at July 25, 2007 1:14 PM | Topic: careers | 8 Comments