Time to Badland the code cracking recruitment campaigns. Again.

Alright! Time to Badland this properly!

I told you about the success of Multisofts' "Code cracking recruitment campaign" running in Sweden two years ago already, but is it back and going viral again. It was highly successful in bringing in potential recriuts, as the ad went viral shared on Reddit and Twitter. Well, it popped back up in programmerhumor on Reddit just a day ago, as the campaign is active again. It's time to Badland it, with the code cracking recruitment ads that came before it. 

First up, the 1988 campaign from Ground Zero that ran in the E3 trade show program. 

Next up, Electronic Arts in Canada ran this billboard in 2003. It spells out "now hiring", but like this: 

"char msg[] = {78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103,0};"

In 2004 Google recruited people with a special billboard, which I brought up in a Badland post in 2006 together with these other examples. Because yes, there's more! 

NSA sent out what looked like a "butt tweet" in 2014, but no, that was code too. 

tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news

— NSA Careers (@NSACareers) May 5, 2014

“Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation.”

In the comments of my previous Badlander, there was also a navngo recruitment ad shared by adgrunts, probably from around 2005 - and two banner campaigns for Dice and VisualStudio that were running in 2006. I'll give an honorary mention to Dice's highway billboards here as well, even though that's just easily read Linux commands and "l33t sp34k" rather than a problem to solve. I suppose they didn't want anyone to crash their car pondering cryptic recruitment ads. 

In 2017, in Cologne, Germany curios PHP posters perplexed passers-by.  Anyone who decodes the code will get the name of a website. If you went to that site you would be greeted in English with the words “Congratulations! You cracked the code!”, and the website explains that they want developers "to come and hack with us." Another image of this campaign can be found on creator Kata Varga's website.

Some non-recruitment ads, written in code: Haagen dazs makes psuedo code headlines in San Francisco posters. A digital poster for O2 would have you win a OnePlus3 if you cracked it. And the most bizarre one, Javascript billboards in Santa Clara told you to mask up until you die.