Nick Smit – My Thoughts

The Background

Towards the end of last year, I was finishing up my final exams at university and starting to look for opportunities in the working world. I had completed the usual applications to McKinsey and Bain, but had gotten the “Sorry, we only take candidates who make the Dean’s List” response. So it was time to start looking for somewhere that put more emphasis on creativity and innovation over the ability to get full marks in a test.

I then came across Quirk Marketing Agency, who had done a couple of guest lectures for the eMarketing course at varsity. After further investigation, I realised that they’ve been responsible for some really great digital work and have an absolutely rockstar team (including the likes of Rob Stokes, Justin Spratt and Sarah Blake to name a few). I was totally sold and knew I had to work there!

The Application

I also knew that I’d have to do something unique and fun to get noticed by Quirk. So I hatched a plan…

I decided that my standard, boring CV would have to go and instead replaced it with The Quirk eDaily – a newspaper version of my CV.

 

I registered the domain name quirkedaily.co.za (unfortunately I’ve since let it expire) and setup some cool custom stats (click the “Click for More Button”) to track visitors and the search queries that bought them to the page.

To demonstrate my knowledge of PPC, I then setup a PPC campaign that was triggered by Googling the name of anyone that worked at Quirk:

The stats on the site would then check the referer URL and show in the pie chart who was searching their name and clicking the advert (there’s some test data in there now).

The Almost

I finished all of the work on the application on a Wednesday afternoon. All that was left was for me to hit the enable button on the PPC campaign and then get tweeting to any QuirkStar I could find on twitter. I decided to hold off until the following Monday – I was going away for the weekend and didn’t want to miss anything while I was away.

But…The next day, I got a reply from my now boss asking whether I’d like to come through to chat to him about a position at Korbitec. I had met with him two weeks previously and although the interview had gone well, I hadn’t thought anything was going to come of it. He wanted to meet on Monday.

The rest, as they say, is history. I went through to Korbitec on Monday and they offered me the super cool job that I have today!

Unfortunately it meant that all the hard work that I did on my Quirk eDaily application never saw the light of day… well, until today!