Hallvord R. M. Steen

Employees anonymous are recruitment stars

Saturday, 24. May 2008, 20:07:36

There is a new recruitment video posted both on the desktopteam blog and on YouTube. I notice the comments and feedback are rather mixed. Some commenters think the video is trying too hard to be cool.

I think the main point of the video is easy to miss. The main point is that those people on the screen are genuine employees, not some PR agency cast. They probably came up with those words to describe Opera all by themselves too (knowing some of them I don't think it was scripted.)

Why is that point easy to miss? Because all of them except Håkon are anonymous. The video does not actually tell a casual watcher that these people work for Opera Software!

So the problem with the video is not that it fails to communicate "cool". The problem is that it fails to communicate "genuine". Simply due to the omission of people's names and titles. Someone please tell HR that "employees anonymous" isn't a group the target audience wants to join...

BTW, funny that one of YouTube's "related links" was Royal Opera House recruitment video - which does pretty much the same thing but pulls it off..

You should consider joining Opera of course

nice stack, Firebugextending the web is hard

Comments

James Justin Harrell # 24. May 2008, 21:26

Why didn't you say this in the YouTube comments? The web is not just a means for content to get from producers to consumers. This is the social web; it is built from all of us.

Oleg # 24. May 2008, 22:16

I really like the video! And I don't think it was trying to be cool. I agree, most of the guys there are the same in the real life, not just on the video. But wait! Just look at their eyes! Their emotions! Heey! I LOVE this clip!!

Michael Payne # 24. May 2008, 23:36

Somewhat wonky that I'm viewing the videos in Flash via a plugin when I could be doing it natively without plugins if the labs HTML5 video work ever made the jump from lab version to Opera 9.5x.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-web-opera-vid/

/michael.

Andrey Petrov # 27. May 2008, 17:22

I think the main point of the video is easy to miss. The main point is that those people on the screen are genuine employees, not some PR agency cast.

Agree.

Hallvord R. M. Steen # 28. May 2008, 21:50

I blame the Wand for not having posted at YouTube in the first place - I was not at my regular computer and didn't want to spend time trying to remember my password :-p

I just tried to post the comment below but it seems YouTube is in a bad mode - for some reason commenting just fails without any error message in O9.5, O9.27, Fx2 and IE7. I give up..

I work for Opera (I'm not in the video though.. ) - these people are all my colleagues. Thanks to herorev for summing up my blog post on the video:
http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2008/05/24/employees-anonymous-are-recruitment-stars

In a nutshell: sorry if it comes across as too advertis-y. The point of the video is that the people in it really are employees.
(Too bad they didn't get colleague Lachlan to star given his earlier YouTube fame.. http://youtube.com/watch?v=qmJKhois7E8 )