When the news came out that Snapchat was recruiting Uber employees via a location-specific "smart filter" in its own app, I hit the streets of San Francisco looking to see who else the messaging company was looking to poach from.
I walked all over San Francisco's downtown, trying places like Slack, Yahoo, Dropbox, Salesforce's Heroku, Zynga, Adobe, and more - with no results. Five miles total.
If Snapchat were actively trying to recruit engineers from these companies, I would have had the option to add a filter with a snarky message from Snapchat along with a link to their jobs page.
But my only success was with Pinterest, where the following geo-filter popped up on my camera screen. It read, "Feeling pinned down?" (Get it? Pin, like Pinterest?)
Matt Weinberger
Meanwhile, Twitter employee Jonah Grant saw a message of his own from within its offices, despite the fact that it didn't work for me when I was outside:
@evanspiegel nice try pic.twitter.com/TfuCCYjq3r
- Jonah Grant (@jonah) April 16, 2015
And I re-confirmed Uber's message still is up and running:
Matt Weinberger
So, there you have it. Snapchat is trying to recruit people from Pinterest, Twitter, and Uber while they're in their offices. There's not much of a common denominator between the companies apart from their popularity and maybe their location services, but if you can read the tea leaves, it may point to where Snapchat wants to take its business.
Still, it seems passive aggressive to target engineers right where they work in this way, and even moreso when you consider that its targeting locales rather than specific users. It's easy to imagine tourists in downtown San Francisco on this sunny day wondering why Snapchat has decided to get all in their faces.
Snapchat spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker told Forbes the geo-filters are a "unique and playful form of recruiting" that are popping up at a "handful" of places. Hazelbaker had no further comment when Business Insider reached her this afternoon about the Pinterest and Twitter filters.