Ghosted, an AI Trailer
Two AI-made videos that ran on Glassdoor’s Instagram
Client
Glassdoor
Role
Concept, storyboards, AI video and edit
Team
Copywriter, social team, brand creative team, Claude (AI creative partner)
Timeline
2026 · Videos made in days
Overview
In 2026 I made the opening videos for two Glassdoor Instagram posts that promoted Glassdoor Recruiter, start to finish with AI tools. For “5 ways you’re losing your recruiter,” I turned a headline into 18 storyboard concepts, then rendered the team’s favorite as a short toy-figure video. The second began as Ghosted, a horror-trailer concept I pitched for the Recruiter launch. It lost the campaign, then came back five months later as the opening of a Halloween post.
01
Problem
Glassdoor needed scroll-stopping video for Recruiter social posts, with no shoot and no production budget. Each carousel needed an opening that made people laugh before they swiped.
Recruiter launched in October 2026, and Glassdoor’s social team kept it in front of job seekers with carousel posts: tips from recruiters, research and a link to try the product. Each carousel opens on a video, and that first second decides whether anyone swipes.
Video normally means a shoot, a budget and weeks of lead time. Our brand team had none of those for a single social post. The job was to make something funny, on brand and finished in days, using AI tools and a small team.
02
From headline to finished video
Post 1: “5 ways you’re losing your recruiter”
Posted October 12. The post shares five job search mistakes from a head of talent. Our brand copywriter wrote the headline. I owned the opening video, from the first sketch to the final edit.
Start from the headline. “Losing your recruiter” is a visual idea already. My job was to find the funniest way to show it in a few seconds, with no words.
Sketch wide. I drew 18 metaphors, from a résumé held up out of quicksand to a balloon drifting away with a “thank you, next” tag. I turned the pencil sketches into storyboards in Midjourney, so every idea was judged at the same level of finish.
Shortlist five. Tug of War, Pinch & Drop, Teeter-Totter, Hourglass and Paper Plane moved on to production.
Set one look. In round one I rendered each idea in FLORA as a miniature toy figure on Glassdoor orange, with a still, an alternate and a short motion test. The toy look kept a joke about rejection playful, not bleak.
Add ideas, not just polish. Round two refined the strongest five and added three new ones: Hedge, Message and Open/Closed. Round three tuned the frames and the type treatment.
Pick the funniest. The team chose Hedge: the figure waves, then backs slowly into a hedge, a nod to the Homer Simpson meme. It got the biggest laugh, and it fit Amy’s advice best.
Finish in the edit. I cut the final video in CapCut. The social team built the carousel around it, and it went live on Oct 12.
Post 2: Ghosted
Posted October 31. This one started as a campaign pitch in April and reached Instagram in October.
Brainstorm with a partner. At the Recruiter campaign kickoff in late April, I worked through creative territories with Claude and came back with five concepts: Ghosted, Stop Applying, Delivered, Got You Covered and Send the Rejection. Each had a pencil sketch or a quick AI image to show the idea.
Find the insight. Job seekers already talk about ghost jobs, ghost recruiters and getting ghosted after the final interview. Ghosted names that horror back to them as a fake movie trailer, played straight, with Recruiter as the way out.
Grow it with the team. After round one in mid-May, our creative leads leaned toward the darker territory. The copywriter, a designer and I combined our ideas into one campaign, The Haunting: Ghosted as the warning, then a staged funeral for the job search, then a haunted house.
Pick the right kind of scary. I explored three looks, 1958 Hammer gothic, ’80s Stranger Things and modern A24 dread, and designed the posters.
Test the title. I compared title treatments, from “Curse of the Cover Letter” to “The Applicant” and “Cubicle 9.” Ghosted stayed as the title.
Storyboard the punchline. The sample scene is a smiling recruiter behind a candlelit desk: “I think you’re an excellent fit. Go ahead and apply.” A beat, then: “I dare you.”
Make it, don’t describe it. There was no budget or time for a director, so I proposed we build it ourselves. I made a proof-of-concept trailer with Midjourney for characters and stills, Veo for video, ElevenLabs for the voiceover and CapCut for the edit.
Bring it back. For this portfolio, Claude and I re-cut the trailer with a Glassdoor Sans title card, a fog transition and a Recruiter end card: “Get matched, not ghosted.”
How Claude helped
Claude was my creative partner on Ghosted. I made the calls on concept, tone and taste. Claude helped me brainstorm territories, tighten the script, compare AI video tools, structure prompts and turn rough notes into the pitch decks.
Post 1, start to finish: 18 storyboards, the shortlist, two rounds of renders in FLORA and the final Hedge frame.
Post 2: the recruiter’s pitch, and the title card.
03
Outcome
Both videos ran on Glassdoor’s Instagram in October 2026. The Hedge video opened the Oct 12 carousel of Amy’s five tips. The social team built both carousels; the opening videos are mine.
Ghosted had a longer road. In round two, The Haunting became the lead direction, with Ghosted as its teaser. Over the summer the campaign moved to a different creative platform, and Recruiter launched without the horror idea. Five months later, just before Halloween, the social team asked to use “that hilarious AI video.” They made it the opening of a Halloween carousel, paired with Glassdoor research showing that mentions of ghosting in reviews have nearly tripled since 2019. On Instagram and LinkedIn, it reached about half the impressions of our average carousel.
04
What I learned
Sketch cheap, render few. Eighteen storyboards cost an afternoon. Rendering only five, then one, kept the AI work focused on ideas the team already liked.
A rough cut beats a description. A storyboard asks people to imagine the joke. A video lets them laugh at it, and that laugh is why Ghosted came back five months after it lost.
AI makes small formats worth making well. A single social post never had budget for a shoot. With AI tools, one designer can bring film-quality craft to it in days.
Craft isn’t the whole job. Our social media program manager’s read on why Ghosted underperformed: it went out on a Friday afternoon, the morning the research arrived, behind a broad hook (“Is professionalism dead?”) and in black and white. Leading with the data (“Ghosting is at record highs”), posting earlier in the week and keeping some brand color would likely have helped it stop the scroll. Next time I’d plan distribution as carefully as the edit.
