Graham Allgood had been applying to internships, only to find his emails unreturned or résumé shoved into piles.
That's when he decided to do something different to stand out from the crowd.
He turned to Snapchat and designed his own geofilter to run an advertising campaign to promote himself as a great hire to the employees of Horizon Media, the largest standalone ad agency in the US.
Geofilters on Snapchat target a specific location and can be overlaid over a photo. In Allgood's case, he designed the Horizon name to appear alongside his at the bottom of the screen with a small "Hey Hire Me" square at the top.
It caught the attention of the company and he landed an interview with it for the next day.
"I got the analytics report back the next morning and I had over 1,000 views of the filter," Allgood told Business Insider.
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As a junior at California Baptist University, he'd already had experience designing the filters for his school to recruit people to university events. But a February update to Snapchat meant that geofilters could now be designed by anyone and placed over a small area, like Horizon Media's New York Office.
Allgood had also studied Horizon Media's Snapchat account to know that on Tuesdays it tends to post pictures from employees in its office, so he decided that that time window would be his target.
"Knowing that they were a larger company with so many employees, I knew people would see it," Allgood said. "For a small company, it would be kinda risky because some people would see it or maybe they wouldn't."
Instead of placing an obnoxious "Hire Me!" with his résumé, Allgood wanted his work and design to speak for itself. He tested it on his own phone using an app called Union that could overlay it on a selfie to make sure the design stood out.
Then he spent about $30 to target Horizon Media on May 3. He interviewed the next day.
While it did draw the attention of the company, Allgood was ultimately told that all of the summer internship slots were filled. Still, Allgood thinks that more people will use the targeted geofilters in the future for advertising campaigns, and he's happy that his experiment still landed an interview with the company he'd love to work for.
"I could've run an ad campaign through twitter and they probably wouldn't have noticed," Allgood said. "I think the interactive way to do the marketing for this résumé is the only reason it worked so well."
