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Max Needed Help. Here’s How He Found It. 

The pandemic changed everything about the workplace: flipping traditional 9 to 5s on their heads with the creation of the hybrid office, the Zoomification of meetings and the uptick in demand for employer flexibility. But the advertising industry has never really been about the 9 to 5 to begin with. So, a few months ago, Luquire – in desperate need of some creative talent – asked ourselves, why are we approaching our hiring in a traditional way?  

Every other day there seems to be a viral story about people doing ~the most~ to get their resumes in front of the right person (remember Nike cakegate?). But why should prospective employees have all the fun? 

So, our team put out there (and we mean out there) a rather unconventional (dare we say…uncomfortably ambitious?) job posting to help find a design partner for our junior copywriter Max McKaig: www.maxneedshelp.com. The cheeky site was developed to poke fun at the need to find Max a counterpart who could bring some artful conception to his words and wit.  

And the risk paid off – twofold! 

With an average website visitor duration of 3 minutes and 28 seconds, site visits from six continents, primary visitor traffic from IP addresses attached to Amazon, Google, Droga, McCann, Ogilvy and VML (to name a few), and 52,000 organic LinkedIn impressions in just three days, Max was overflowing with prospective helpers – ultimately resulting in two junior art director hires.  

Hope Knudson and Justin Alcala joined Luquire in January 2023 as a result of this campaign. Hope, whose previous experience included stints at Saatchi & Saatchi and 360i, first saw the website after an existing connection liked Max’s organic LinkedIn post calling for help, while Justin received two separate messages from peers encouraging him to apply for the position. 

“I was immediately drawn to the agency after seeing the website, because it absolutely felt like something I would do myself,” said Hope. “I felt so aligned with Max’s sense of humor and wanted to be a part of the agency that supported that kind of out-of-the-box thinking.” Knudson was especially taken by the entire section Max dedicated to his love of “Survivor,” and his desire for a partner with whom he could share his obsession. Knudson wasted no time convincing Max that she wanted to drop her buff and merge tribes.  

While the Luquire team was initially looking for just one junior art director, the talent flowing from the unconventional site – and the influx of new business this spring – necessitated multiple hires. Justin Alcala graduated from the University of Kentucky amid the pandemic and shortly after enrolled in two master’s programs, at the Miami Ad School and Florida International University, respectively. Justin saw Max’s post while on the full-time job hunt shortly after his internship at Havas Media Group came to a close.  

“Creating a site like MaxNeedsHelp.com involves a great deal of creative risk, and the fact that Luquire leaned into that uncertainty completely appealed to me,” Justin said. “The willingness to develop a campaign like this spoke to the type of creative talent Luquire was looking to attract, and I knew I wanted a ticket to wherever that ship was going.”  

Since joining Luquire earlier this year, Hope, Justin and Max have been a triple threat, working together on campaigns like Visit North Carolina’s “Dream Big” sweepstakes and the launch of Harris Teeter’s “In Food with Love,” and a host of new business pitches, as well as clients including RSM and Bojangles. And just last month, Justin was awarded “Best in Show” at the Atlanta Ad Club  ADDYs for his artistic direction of “The Toilet Paper Chronicles,” a student-driven campaign to tackle declining reading rates by printing  Penguin Publishing Group classics on Charmin products. 

So, what does Max have to say about all this? 

A wise man once said, ‘In this game, fire represents your life. When your fire’s gone so are you.’ But with Hope and Justin in my tribe lighting my fire, our torch is burning brighter than ever, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here.” 

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