Recruiting with Riddles

Whether you’re a small or a large organization, recruiting and retaining top talent is critical. As a digital agency, JDM is always on the lookout for talented developers and designers, but when we started looking into doing our own recruiting, the noise from applicants was deafening. Leave it to Google, to find a better way. 

All the way back in 2004, Google started recruiting their own nerds by using a billboard (placed in the heart of Silicon Valley) with a stark-white mathematical call-to-action question so complex most commuters would need Google to crack.

The recruitment riddle on the billboard reads, simply: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits e}.com”. The answer, “7427466391.com” leads to a web page with yet another equation to solve and still no sign the game is hosted by Google Labs.

According to Google themselves in an interview with CNET,

[quote]As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.[/quote]

Bravo, guys!

So, seven years after Google used its fascinating recruiting riddle, JDM is working on our own. Why should Google have all the fun?