Careerbuilder's nasty side
Posted: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:00 AM by Rob Neill
Filed Under:
Financial services
We’re on record as loving Careerbuilder.com’s “Heart” Super Bowl ad, and are willing to go on record that the later one “Spider” wasn’t nearly as good.
Still given that most of the ads during the game stunk on ice, batting .500 is pretty good for any company not named Anheuser-Busch.
So when we heard that the company had a new viral-advergame-thingee we figured it’d at least be worth it to waste some time with it do some research. What a disappointment.
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First off, who knew that gruntled was actually a word? We didn’t. In any event, the company’s “National Gruntledness Index” attempts to show where in the country people are most- and least-happy with their job. We’re a little dubious about their methodology (which they snarkily quasi-spell out in their FAQ – more about the snarkiness in a bit) for two reasons which we will list in ascending order:
- Seems most people are happy with their job.
- Seems people in Modesto, Calif., are happy.
The application gives you the opportunity to determine your “Personal Gruntledness Index.” It runs you through more-than-a-few questions about your life, job and perceptions (unfortunately, it assumes you like cats). We ran through it three times, and thanks to a few variations in the questions, got three different scores. Though all showed us to be fairly gruntled (love our job, boss!), it did counsel us to immediately begin checking out job listings on Careerbuilder.
We can understand that. Their job is to get you to view their listings. And the whole experience might have been a good idea except for a few major flaws.
The background music is ‘70s-porn quality (not that we’d know, really) light jazz, regardless of how snappily they want to name it, i.e. “Brutal Flut,” “Smoove Grov,” etc.
- There are too many questions.
- Every instruction and result is delivered in this stilted, quasi-snarky, almost condescending tone. It could be funny, but it just never really is. It’s almost like an exact approximation of someone being funny, yet not.
- We can’t say this enough: It assumes the test-taker likes cats.
Bad idea, bad execution, bad time. Please, Careerbuilder, bring back the monkeys.
