Hey youth: McDonald's wants you to apply for jobs on Snapchat
McDonald's is cool, it's hip, it's trying to reach the kids on Snapchat.
To that end, the company has rolled out fast food-themed lenses and stories on the social media platform. Now, for the first time, it's also fielding job applications.
On Friday, McD's launched "Snaplications" in Australia. It comes in the form of a Snapchat lens, which shows the user in a McDonald's uniform and lets users apply for a job by sending a 10 second snap to the @Maccas account (Maccas is slang in Australia for McDonald's).
If 10 seconds doesn't seem sufficient to convey a complete resume, don't worry. Mark Wheeler, McDonald's digital director in Australia, explained that after a user sends a snap, the company will reply with a link to its career site for the sender to complete the process.
"For young people who apply to McDonald's, it's normally their first job," he added. "Really, when we're assessing the opportunity for them to come and join our 100,000 crew base, we're really looking at attitude and enthusiasm. I think within 10 seconds, we can get that across."
McDonald's is the largest youth employer in Australia, and Wheeler said the brand is trying to reach "happy, smiley" young people wherever they are.
The job application lens is just the latest way the brand is using Snapchat. It's created a burger and fries lens in the past — a majority of the platform's four million or so Australian users engaged with it, according to Wheeler — as well as stories.
"Obviously, it's a great way to work with a younger audience," he said. "It's a good opportunity to talk on their terms, if you like."
For now, Snaplications will run for only one day, but it will be accessible past Friday via its Snapchat code. Wheeler said that if the trial is successful, they may experiment with the unusual hiring strategy again in the future.
It wouldn't be the first time a large corporation has leveraged Snapchat for recruiting millennials. JPMorgan, for example, ran ads on Snapchat's "Graduation Live Story" and on 80 Campus stories and Discover channels from May until mid-June 2016, Business Insider reported at the time.
McDonald's digital director said the aim of using digital properties, including Facebook and Instagram, is to make the brand appear relevant, modern and progressive.
Of course, cynically using progressive values can backfire. The pushback against the now infamous Pepsi ad, in which reality star Kendall Jenner solved police state violence armed only with a can of soft drink, is only the most recent example.
Wheeler would not comment about the Pepsi ad directly, and he was not able to speak about recent allegations of teen employees being made to work without pay at a McDonald's store in Queensland.
"We take seriously marketing to underage or marketing to children," he said. "And we're family-focused as well, so we want to be respectful and responsible in everything we do.
"A brand of this size and this scale -- you have to take responsibility in the way we go to market."
Responsibility aside, one big problem is that McDonald's is just not cool. Snapchat, eh, it's cool enough. Together? They're dorky as hell.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
