A new recruitment company has been launched on LinkedIn that specialises in finding talent to work on unethical brands. The initiative, created by Passion Digital, looks to raise awareness around marketing agencies that fail to disclose when they are advertising a role to work on unethical brands.
‘Authenicl Recruitment’ (an anagram for Unethical) is the world’s first ‘Unethical recruitment company’ and its purpose is to find out whether people would take a job at a marketing agency if they knew exactly what they would be contributing to by helping unethical brands thrive. To launch the agency, they published a job description on LinkedIn and other job boards that advertised a role for an anonymous marketing agency. The advertised role gave a top line explanation of the industries and vague but typical look at the responsibilities that the lucky candidate would carry out. After it was live for two weeks and applications were received, the job description was replaced with a more ‘honest’ breakdown of the job that described the very grim but real activities that they would be contributing to.
The ‘honest’ description listed, Animal Cruelty, Fast Fashion and Pay Day Loans as the tricky industries the winning candidate would be working on. The full job description reads as:
Fast Fashion
One of the biggest fast fashion retailers in the UK. They are famous for exploiting sweatshops and mass producing clothes.They are trying to shake off this image and running a greenwashing campaign which you’ll be responsible for spearheading. You’ll be the lead on the planning and implementation of the global digital, paid social, paid search, SEO, display, programmatic and affiliate marketing strategies.
Animal Cruelty
This is an Internationally renowned skincare brand that tests its products on animals. Community management will be key because they receive a lot of negative comments from users calling out their unethical practices. You will be responsible for social media growth, with a particular focus on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok with a particular focus on positive customer engagement to distract people from the fact they test chemicals on rabbits.
Payday loans
This brand has been exploiting the poor with high interest rates for years in the UK. You will be responsible for the development and execution of their global go-to-market plan and building relevant personas within this sector to target the financially vulnerable on a global level.
The initial job description received 80 applications, where as the ‘honest’ description only received two.
Rob Shaw, content strategist for Passion Digital said:
“We contacted everyone that responded to the first job description and then sent them the honest one. Those that replied made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the role or the agency that was hiring for it. When you work for an agency, It’s easy to disconnect yourself from the brands you work on or forget the impact you might have. But we wondered what would happen if you were told from the very start about the unethical practices that you would be contributing to. It turns out most people would rather not help unethical brands thrive and we believe they should be disclosed on the job description that any agency puts out.”
