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FC Expert Blog

Careers: If Only You Could Work Here

BY FC Expert Blogger Rusty WestonWed Jul 25, 2007 at 2:14 PM
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

Have you ever wandered into an office staffed by 55 employees who are mostly 24-years-old and in their first job out of college? It might be kind of fun, right?

And in this particular office above Union Square in New York City, they throw the occasional staff party billed as the "Thursday Night Hang." The workers in this firm called Connected Ventures run three pretty cool companies: a site called CollegeHumor.com; a t-shirt company called Busted Tees; and a video community site that predates YouTube called Vimeo.com.

One evening at a company party, they recorded the following video, for fun, on a single take. It wasn't intended to be a recruitment video; it just turned out that way. Note, it takes about 40 seconds or more to get grooving and some of the words in a song you will hear are mature. Don't worry, nothing else about the video is mature, it's all in fun.



Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from Vimeo.

There were unexpected outcomes to this exercise:

  • Four million people have "viewed" this video since it was posted in May
  • The video has been widely discussed on blogs around the world, including on Tech Crunch's CrunchNotes site. Many of the comments are variations of this: "I want to work there"
  • In homage to Connected Ventures' groundbreaking effort, an office of Paris-based designers (Heaven.fr) recorded a lip-dub to Weezer's Sweater song. (Some say it is better, but I don't think so.)
  • Résumés are streaming into Connected Ventures

"We put it on online so we could share it with friends and so people," says Ricky Van Veen, one of the founders of the company and Editor-in-Chief of CollegeHumor.com. "It didn't occur to us that anybody outside of the office would want to see it."

Amandalyn Ferri, who works in marketing at Busted Tees, has won a lot of admirers for her "performance" that marks the beginning of the video - a "lip-dub" to Harvey Danger's Flagpole Sitta. "I work here and I think that people are under the impression that as a company we all just sit around and do nothing," she says. "We definitely give off the impression that we hang out and it's like a college dorm 24x7. Realistically it's not a surprise to come back and see people working at 8 or 9 p.m."

If most of us could stop working by 9 p.m. we would be pretty happy.

"It has been such a great recruiting tool for us," says Van Veen, who performs in the video. "We saw a couple of hundred résumés just blindly. People said, 'I don't know what you do but I just want to work at your company.'" They're hiring.

Rusty Weston, My Global Career • San Francisco, Ca • http://www.myglobalcareer.com/

Topics:

Careers, Vimeo.com, Connected Ventures LLC, Harvey Danger, Ricky Van Veen, New York City


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Recent Comments | 9 Total

July 25, 2007 at 4:33pm by mark

I wish i could work here. boy i wish i could. oh well...

July 26, 2007 at 9:05am by Paul Hebert

Prediction - huge numbers of startups and "cool" companies will now compete for the best video. Get ready for the deluge!

Question - what song would you want to represent your company?

July 27, 2007 at 1:40am by Jason

Where are the minorities?

August 17, 2007 at 1:37am by Art Stiefel-EngineRoom Brand Communications

inspired. energetic. innovative. well done fun that gave me an insight into the Collegehumor.com team and why i have been a longtime fan.

September 13, 2007 at 7:32pm by Arthur Kannas

Hi Rusty, thank you very much for quoting our french company, heaven.
We are proud to be featured in the Fast Companies universe.

As for the video qualities, we love the Connected Ventures one. And to be honest, the have beaten us at lipdubbing (native language, though). Nevertheless, I am very proud of what my team has been doing, especially with a long "plan Sequence" (ahem, meaning NO CUTS), on three floors.
The guys directing the video are the guys from the TakeAwayShows.com, that we are publishing.

Cheers,
Arthur

October 20, 2007 at 9:33am by Bob Monkey

They should have taken a shot out the window of the people shaking cups below.

October 22, 2007 at 11:38am by bo

i actually have no qualifications or any reason to think that i could be hired here, and yet i think i might just apply or call or some other random way of making myself known for no other reason than this video. though i did check the company out...living in another country however might pose a bit of a problem, hmmm

December 7, 2007 at 2:04pm by Song

I took a brief tour of Connected Ventures. You can see the video here: http://marioa.squarespace.com/blog/2007/12/7/behind-the-scenes-of-connec...

October 10, 2008 at 5:13am by Desiree Banugo

I've just been passed this link by my COO - I wonder if we could do something to recruit clients...

If I was in my 20s I'd love to work there too if I could get a work visa - I love New York. In fact, my days at Yahoo! in London were almost as cool!