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Recruiters: You, too, can YouTube

What a great day at work: First, make a video that portrays the boss as a pizza hog who sends his workers off on ridiculous projects.

What a great day at work:

First, make a video that portrays the boss as a pizza hog who sends his workers off on ridiculous projects.

Then, post it on YouTube, so everyone can see it. Next, win $2,000 - and kudos - from the same boss, who does, by the way, look as if he enjoys his pizza.

That happened at Gestalt L.L.C., of Camden, putting the software-design company at the leading edge of a trend in recruitment: the use of Internet videos on YouTube as a tool to attract workers.

"YouTube-style videos are being used for employers and job seekers to market to each other," said Mark Oldman, cofounder of Vault.com, a media company that publishes career guides, and posts video resumes and company recruitment videos.

"The whole phenomenon is crystallizing right now."

Besides Gestalt, Cisco Systems Inc., the CIA, the Los Angeles Police Department, and even Haverford Township's volunteer fire company have turned to YouTube to attract talent.

Why the trend?

More home computers can now handle streaming video; before, it was clunky.

Recruiters want to reach workers where they are, and younger job candidates like YouTube, a Google Inc. subsidiary that collects tens of thousands of video clips.

The amateurish videos on YouTube carry an aura of authenticity appealing to a generation jaded by slick media.

And finally, the medium itself is the message - funny, real, hip and technically savvy - all the characteristics of a wonderful place to work.

"The style and the tone is as important as the message, and, in many cases, more important," Oldman said.

That was Gestalt's take.

In April, Gestalt's human resources department, partly on a whim and mostly to find more highly skilled workers, set up a recruitment contest.

Any employee could make an employment video for the military and high-tech software company and post it on YouTube. No rules. There would be a companywide vote, and the winner would get a Mac laptop or $2,000.

"I have to admit I was nervous," said William Loftus, the pizza-loving chief executive officer. "We have a lot of creative people. When you give them free creative license, that is something that is going to put me out of my comfort zone."

But he knew that was how it had to be to get the results he wanted. "Bigger companies want to control the message," he said, "but the real image comes from what people really are, not what veneer the marketing department puts on a company."

Gestalt's employees produced more than a dozen videos. They were posted on YouTube and also distributed by e-mail to outside recruiting firms Gestalt uses.

One recruiter, Boyd Kelly, cofounder of Liberty Personnel Services Inc., of King of Prussia, said he thought the videos helped him sell Gestalt to a talented software developer.

Kelly said he liked the video that suggested that Loftus was a Klingon, a warrior race from Star Trek.

"It brought the CEO to the level of all the coworkers, and he was enjoying it. I feel that's what people want. They want to feel they are on the same level as the management," Kelly said.

The winning Gestalt video, by John Moffett, 25, a software engineer, depicted Moffet's fairly sophomoric jaunt through the woods on an "important," but nameless mission, assigned by Loftus, who text-messaged him in the thick of a crisis with instructions to bring back pizza.

Making the video brought Moffett closer to his coworkers, he said, because he had to ask them to participate. Indeed, the internal morale-building aspect of the contest was an unexpected dividend.

"You have to have fun," he said, "and the most fun part was that I got to make fun of the CEO and get paid for it."

The videos, all posted last month, range in quality, but even the best nowhere approaches the professional cinematography in a series of recruitment videos for the Los Angeles Police Department.

"This is Hollywood. Let's take advantage of it," said city information officer Bruce Whidden, who helped write scripts for the action-packed videos released in 2004.

"Young people are very techno-savvy. If they are on the Web visiting YouTube, we want to be there," he said.

That is what the Haverford Township Fire Bureau, which administers several volunteer companies, also thought.

With their numbers dwindling, assistant chief Christopher Millay at the Llanerch company and others wondered how they could reach younger volunteers.

"Do we even know what's cool anymore?" he asked.

They turned to experts in cool: the video-editing class at Haverford High School, which created a movie last year. The company's webmaster, age 24, suggested posting the video on YouTube. Millay said it had attracted some interest from potential volunteers - including one of the high school videographers.

But there are risks to the YouTube strategy. Companies cannot control the comments posted by viewers of their videos - or even the videos themselves.

For example, a sarcastic video criticizing wages at regional airlines comes up next to a flattering recruitment video about PSA Airlines Inc., a wholly owned regional subsidiary of US Airways Group Inc.

But US Airways had nothing to do with either video, spokeswoman Valerie Wunder said. Videos are not "our standard form of recruitment," she said. The airline relies on job fairs.

"Maybe," Wunder said, "it's something we should think about in the future."

For links to a variety of recruitment videos, see http://go.philly.com/video24

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