Many people believe that first impressions are everything. Not only do we now live in a world where the media is almost exclusively image-driven, but where social interaction is dominated by the use of modern technology, such as smartphones and computers.
A new local pub in Irishtown has taken advantage of this new trend by using an innovative method for hiring staff.
Sober Lane, which opened its doors on July 16th, decided to dispense with tradition by launching a recruitment drive for staff, with applications only being accepted via Snapchat, the photo and video app that was launched in 2011. The seminal thrust of the move was to evaluate the personality of the applicant without the restrictions of a back-and-forth dialogue, thus determining who would be suitable for the role. Applicants were invited to send their Snaps to the Sober Lane Snapchat profile.
Snapchat is a mobile phone app that allows users to send and receive photos and videos that are self-destructing. The sender can determine how many seconds between one and 10 the recipient can view the photo/video before the file disappears from the recipient’s device.
According to Snapchat in May 2014, there were approximately 700 million photos and videos being shared by users each day. The app is also used by approximately 255,000 people in Ireland on a daily basis, making it more popular than other apps and sites such as Pinterest, Vine and Bebo. These figures were reported last year in the most recent Ipsos MRBI report.
The drive has turned out to be a success, with over 2,000 Snapchat interviews taking place, while the bar itself was inundated with some 200 applications within the first hour alone.
NewsFour sat down with the manager of Sober Lane on Irishtown Road, Conor Liston, to discuss the Snapchat drive. The drive was the offspring of a series of ideas proposed by Liston and owner Ernest Cantillon, who were both eager to try a new recruitment angle that was both effective and quirky at the same time.
“It was just a new, fun way of getting CV’s, rather than the usual mundane approach of reading through what someone got in their Leaving Cert,” Liston told NewsFour.
Such an open hiring forum was always bound to lead to an entire stratosphere of different personalities, pranksters and people wanting to take advantage of the Snapchat invitation, if not the job offer itself.
“There were videos of guys doing handstands, dressing up in costumes, doing quotes from movies, making cocktails, people on unicycles and the rest of it,” Liston said.
With a total staff number of 22, between 15 and 18 were hired as a result of the Snapchat drive. The initiative has gained some media attention also, with some punters quizzing staff about it.
“There have been people asking the staff what did they do for their Snapchat interview?” Liston said. “Some people think it was a hoax and that it was just a pure stunt, but more than half the staff were actually hired from it.”
By Craig Kinsella
