How Volkswagen Hid Secret Messages In Broken Car Parts To Poach Mechanics From The Competition

If you’re a mechanic looking for work right now here on Earth, you’re in a pretty good place right now. I say this not just because of Earth’s excellent selection of cars and cafés and water parks (as of this writing, the best in the known universe) but because at this moment there is huge global demand for car mechanics and technicians. This means that good technicians are hard to find and in huge demand, which drives recruiters crazy. How do you find the good mechanics and technicians? A couple of years ago, Volkswagen had a pretty clever – perhaps even a bit devious – idea to not just recruit, but literally poach technicians from other shops. And it sounds like spy hijinx.

I’m sort of surprised I’d never heard about this before (I heard about it randomly from this Insta account), but from what I can tell, the project – which VW referred to as Inside Jobs – was only done in France, as part of a Volkswagen France Group initiative. What VW did was extremely clever and sneaky – remember, this is the company that pulled off Dieselgate shenanigans for quite a while with some really clever tricks.

Essentially, what VW did was to send a bunch of cars to repair shops all over France, with parts that required repair or maintenance having special messages and a QR code engraved on them or on a sticker or something similar. The text explained that VW was looking for technicians, and the QR code took whoever scanned it to a link to apply for jobs.

Here, they made a whole ad about it after the project was over:

That’s pretty damn clever, isn’t it? Sneaky, sure, but clever as hell. VW France was looking for 1,000 new recruits; their recruitment page got over 113,219 views (normally those sorts of pages would have gotten about 15,000) and over 53,000 mechanics and techs applied, for those 1,000 jobs, of which I assume all were filled.

The engraved messages on the parts are especially appealing, like this brake rotor:

…or this exhaust pipe:

And here’s an example of one of the stickers, which seem to have been placed on things like batteries and air filters:

If you’re wondering where that QR code goes, it goes here. I’m not sure if VW in France is still hiring, though.

I have heard that currently there are car dealerships in America that are doing similar things, like putting recruitment stickers on oil filters of cars, in hopes they’ll be seen by other mechanics.

The commercial refers to these as sort of “Trojan horses,” and I suppose that’s a fitting historical/mythical analogy. Maybe? It’s a little sloppy, as the Trojan Horse was a deliberately deceptive thing that hid soldiers; this is more like a cleverly hidden message with an offer, one that would only be discovered by the people they wanted to contact.

The only example of this I can think of in popular culture that is similar is probably from the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man, which has a whole strange vignette about a message hidden in teeth:

Of course, that hidden message, while it got to a dentist, has an essentially unknowable purpose. Unlike VW’s hidden messages, which let them hire a thousand French mechanics.

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