How luquire Accidentally Revolutionised Creative Hiring with Absurdist Art Project

When Charlotte-based indie agency luquire set out to find a junior art director, they didn’t post a boilerplate listing. Instead, luquire unleashed Max McKaig into the world with a plea: “Please, someone help Max!”

As a junior copywriter, Max realised he needed an art director partner and he and luquire didn’t want to just post another “dynamic creative team wanted” job listing. Instead, they built MaxNeedsHelp.com, a horribly bad-on-purpose website that drags candidates deep into the bizarre, spreadsheet-organised, LEGO-stacked brain of Max himself.

Applicants face 20 puzzles ranging from identifying emotional dissonance in stock pasta photography to choosing the correct shade of blue from Max’s proprietary Optimal Emotional Resonance colour spreadsheet. There’s even a section dedicated to Max’s favourite campfire setup (spoiler: not the Great Depression trashcan fire).

It’s part escape room, part fever dream, part recruitment test. The prize for survival? A shot at becoming Max’s creative partner.

The results in the first week?

• 12 minutes average session duration
• 72% of traffic to job posting, with 92.8% of people who completed the application originating on the site
• 244 applications and counting
• 3K impressions across social with 281 clicks (9.34% CTR on LinkedIn)

So while most agencies are writing job posts that sound like rejected dating profiles (“must be collaborative, detail-oriented, love long walks through brainstorms”), luquire let Max’s unfiltered weirdness do the work – and is ending up with a successful recruitment campaign.

Max McKaig, copywriter at luquire said, "Interesting creatives are more apt to respond to interesting creative work. I think the site gave creatives permissions to drop a lot of the formality around their introductions, which made things immediately more fun. Creatives are always looking for ways to stand out in these kinds of situations, and I feel like MaxNeedsHelp gave them permission to turn it up to 11. Hell yes, I want to hear your alligator encounter story as a means to introduce yourself. Someone reached out to me about the job and their very first point of communication was to discuss Bernadette Peters in the original Broadway cast of Into the Woods. In terms of connecting with a potential partner, I don’t know how you could cut to the chase much better than that."