Think back to your very first job application. Perhaps you sent an awkwardly worded email to Jay Jays, or awkwardly dropped your CV off at your nearest Sanity, or awkwardly cold called Muffin Break and hung up just as the awkward 16-year-old shift supervisor answered the phone.
Now what if you could take that experience, and make it … public? While also creating free publicity for the company you’re applying to?
If you think this sounds like an incredible idea, there’s at least one company that agrees: Hilton, which is doing basically this in Australia, pitched as a bold new age for hospitality hiring.
The hotel company’s #hiremehilton recruitment campaign asks jobseekers to ditch the traditional CV and instead create a short video showing how they would go “above and beyond” to ensure Hilton guests have a good stay. They need to upload it as a public TikTok post, tagging the campaign and adding the hashtag.
When I say this is a PR stunt, I don’t mean it as a pejorative. Hilton’s announcement said the campaign had been developed by a PR agency. Now, I’m not saying Hilton has no intention of hiring anyone as a result of this – but the hiring part feels like an afterthought. The primary goal seems to be to generate a wave of free #hiremehilton content from creators – sorry, desperate jobseekers – with the hope some of the videos, and thus the campaign, will go viral.
For many people – particularly those who’ve grown up in the land of tall poppy syndrome – applying for jobs is already a cringeworthy act of self-promotion. Getting young, desperate jobseekers to do it in public in the name of #engagement is an insult I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
The credulous media coverage of this campaign has thrown around a number of unhinged claims and here’s just some of them.
One article states: “According to Hilton’s research, 68% of Gen Zs would rather apply for a job via social media than with a resume, while 82% said the time it took to write a traditional application could discourage them from applying in the first place.”
Assuming this research is accurate – and why shouldn’t I believe the researcher, Hilton themselves? – then this establishes that gen Zs say it takes too long to write a job application.
What it doesn’t establish is that gen Zs think filming a TikTok video is a breeze.
In another article Hilton’s Asia Pacific human resources director, Mary Hogg, says the campaign aims to remove recruitment barriers and increase candidate diversity. As reported by Nine News (in a report I watched on TikTok), Hilton says TikTok recruitment encourages diversity.
If Hilton did really want to improve diversity of new hires, it might consider blind reviews of applications, or anonymising information on applications. Or it could ignore any of the prevailing opinions on the topic of stamping out unconscious bias and do the literal opposite of this!
I don’t know. I’m not an HR professional. But I’d argue that this campaign will succeed in reducing diversity by limiting the candidate pool to young, middle-class applicants who all share the lack of a shame gland.
Hogg told the Australian Financial Review that Hilton had gone with the TikTok pilot to attract gen Z workers, who use the platform more regularly than older generations.
If you really want to stay relevant among gen Z workers, recognise the wealth gap and post everyone in the organisation’s salary online. “We did a TikTok” won’t cut it.
Let’s assume for a second that Hilton genuinely thinks this is a great idea for hiring the best people for the job. Plenty of people feel uncomfortable posting publicly on social media, or have ditched social media entirely. (There are plenty of good reasons to!) If Hilton really thought videos were the superior form of job applications then why not just ask candidates to send them privately.
Finally, can you imagine working with a team of people who all share main character syndrome? Just load me into a cannon and fire me directly into the sun.
