How to Get a Job at BuzzFeed

All About Them-

This is an American organization of internet news, entertainment. They focus on digital media. They are called BuzzFeed. The company is based in New York City and was founded in the year 2006 by John Peretti and John S. Johnson III. Their goal was to track viral and buzzing content. The co-founder and chairman of the Huffington Post Kenneth Lerer began his position as the co-founder of BuzzFeed then became executive chairman. Today’s topic is How to Get a Job at BuzzFeed.

The company is known for online quizzes, current news of politics and pop culture, and blogs known as listicles. They provide content in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Japanese, and many more languages. They became a global media and technology organization to provide coverage on various topics such as politics, DIY, animals, and business. In the year 2011, Ben Smith of Politico was hired by BuzzFeed to be positioned as editor-in-chief. His task was to expand the company’s website to long-form journalism and reportage.

In the year 2021, BuzzFeed News won the award of National Magazine for spending years of their journalism investigation. They even won the George Polk Award and the Pulitzer, they have been nominated for the award of Michael Kelly. Even though BuzzFeed got into journalism, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, the majority of respondents gave a vote that the company has an unreliable source despite age and political affiliation. The organization has then moved to the main section of the website.

History

The prior was to establish the company BuzzFeed, the position of director of research and development and the OpenLab at Eyebeam was John Peretti, the viral media has experimented at the art and technology nonprofit in New York. In the year 2006, as Peretti was focusing on the Huffington Post, he started BuzzFeed as a small project while partnering with his former supervisor John Johnson. At first, the organization began to employ the role to collect viral stories from the internet, to look for stories on various websites.

They launched BuzzFeed as an instant message, a client called BuzzBot, and the role of sending users links to popular content. The message that was sent was based on algorithms, it was to examine the links which were immediately spread throughout the blogs, for them it was aggregating. The website gained the most views for their links, Peretti, later on, hired curators and their role was to describe the popular content around the website.

In the year 2001, since Ben Smith was getting so much attention for being the political blogger, Peretti hired him in the position to assemble the operation of news and with the listicles to make it aggregated. In the year 2016, the content of news and entertainment have been separated, was transformed into BuzzFeed News and the latest BuzzFeed Entertainment Group where BuzzFeed Motion Picture was included.

During the same year, the organization gained correspondents from twelve countries along with foreign editions from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Indian, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom. At the end of the year 2017, the employment rate increased almost up to 1700 across the world.

BuzzFeed Acquisitions

The first acquisition of BuzzFeed was in the year 2012, this is when the organization purchased Kingfish Labs, which was a startup founded by Rob Fishman. Originally, it was to focus on the optimization of Facebook advertisements. In 2014, during October, the organization announced the next acquisition was HuffPost for a stock deal and it made Verizon Media a minority shareholder in BuzzFeed. In the year 2021, they made the plans for the ongoing public through a Special-purpose acquisition organization. They have acquired Complex Networks.

BuzzFeed Content

The organization has started to produce content by featuring staff work reporters, contributors, cartoon artists, and the community. The popular formats on the company’s website have included videos, quizzes, and lists. They made the style of the content have inspired ClickHole, a parody website. According to the New York Times, the company first began to focus only on viral content to build a track record so that they could deliver the breaking news and reports until the year 2014.

During that year, the New Yorker observed as the company had deleted almost 4,000 posts. It was to make improvements and to create better content. Between December 2013 and April 2014, BuzzFeed has been ranked at the top of NewsWhip “Facebook Publisher Rankings’ ‘ And right then Huffington Post entered the position.

BuzzFeed News

The organization created the news division in December 2011 as Ben Smith was appointed as editor-in-chief. During the year 2013, Mark Schoofs who is known for being the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was hired as the head of reporting investigation and after three years BuzzFeed gained about twenty investigative journalists.

YouTube Channel

The company’s youtube channel contains their original content, the production studio and team are based in California, Los Angeles. Ze Frank was hired in the year 2012 to produce videos for BuzzFeed and since then he has seen creating many videos for the “The Try Guys”. In August 2014, the organization made a new announcement on their latest division called BuzzFeed Motion Picture to produce feature-length videos. On 7th May 2020, the company gained up to 16.6 billion views and 20 million subscribers. Their youtube channel has been signed for a two feature-length series that is to be created by BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, it was entitled Broke and Squad Wars.

Social Media Platform

BuzzFeed daily receives a majority of the traffic, it created the content and has been shared on the social media website. They have the work of judging the content to see how viral it will be. What they want is a continuous feedback loop, it is where the videos and articles have been used as an input for the operation of the data. The websites conduct tests on the content that was custom by the in-house team of data scientists.

John Peretti and Ducan Watts created the algorithm, it was dubbed and they used the formula for the editors, users, and advertisers to try as many ideas as they wanted to maximize the distribution. The writers were ranked based on the views of the internal leaderboard and in the year 2014, the company has received about 45% of views from social media outlet links for example Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.

Community

On 17th July 2012, there was a publication from the humor website called McSweeney’s Internet Tendency on the piece named “Suggested BuzzFeed Articles’ ‘ it was a prompt for BuzzFeed to create as many suggestions as possible. The company has listed McScweeney’s as a “Community Contributor”, the post was frequently received about 350,000 pages views. The post has prompted the company for a user submission. In May 2013 the website launched a section called “Community” for the user to enable submitting content, there were limitations to publish only one post per day and yet the submission capacity has increased to raise the “Cat Power” which was to describe the website as their measure of the rank in BuzzFeed’s Community.

How to get a job at BuzzFeed?

This is all about getting a job in the organization of news and entertainment for the youth audiences, BuzzFeed is one of those organizations being similar when it comes to looking for a job. However, there are some differences which is why it is important to prepare for answering questions and being presentable in particular ways, the way it reflects the organization’s culture.

Choose a Position

Content Writing

BuzzFeed has job opportunities for writing content, being published authors, poets, bloggers, and many more. The content positions include various roles such as writing news, personal essays, lists, quizzes, and entertainment news. And so you need to have the skills and experiences of writing while applying for the job. If you’re a fresher you have a high chance of having the job of junior staff writer. You can also apply for the roles of editors but you need to have journalism experiences of at least five years and the experiences of the editor of two years.

Video Making

If you want to apply for the position of video making or production of videos then BuzzFeed is the perfect company because they have lots of job opportunities. There is segmentation by content topics and so you need to look at the areas such as Lifestyle, parenting, culinary, and many more. The video department has some options for example editing, production, and design and you can apply in the entry-level position or producer positions as long as you have the experience in those roles.

Designer

This is for applying for the position in design and engineering since the organization has various tech roles such as developer and programmer if you have the skills of coding. The specialization of IT is very demanding as well as software engineers and so you can apply for entry-level positions.

Freelancer

This is a job position for those who want to work from home. The job offers are writing, artistic, and administrative, and relocating won’t be necessary. They offer temporary positions which is why you need to check the company’s website as constantly as possible when they offer new opportunities.

Internship

If you’re a college student you can apply for an internship at BuzzFeed they offer during the summer season. They offer paid internships for ten weeks, it is full time and they give training in the department. If you apply for an internship it is likely to be recruited by BuzzFeed. Recently the internship opportunities are engineering, product manager, data science, and product design.

Apply for the Position

Research

You need to look into the company’s website to see the job position they offer and see the kinds of offers that are available in the fields since they constantly expand their business and they always hire employees for all their departments. You need to choose the job position of your interest that you are most qualified for. You need to read the job description, look at the details carefully.

Job Location

Before applying for a job the organization you need to check the location. They have many branches around the world from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco to Sydney and Tok. You have to make sure you are applying for the position that is located for your preferences. And if you’re willing to relocate you can keep applying. The company conducts interviews for foreign applicants through Skype. Once you’re hired for the job, they are willing to help you with the relocations.

Fill the Application

After reading the job description, fill out the application by highlighting your skills, knowledge that fulfills the job position and makes your application unique.

Submit Resume

Your resume and cover letter need to show the specification for the positions you’re applying for. You can make your resume interesting and color by using graphics and other touches to reflect your personality. You include your email address, phone number so that BuzzFeed can reach out to you. You can also add the link to your website or a blog.

References

If you know someone who is an employee of BuzzFeed, this can be to your advantage by telling them about the job positions that you’re interested in applying to see if you have the chance of being hired as an employee of BuzzFeed. They should recognize your skills and knowledge. And you can also ask them what has to be done to start the referral process.

Social Media Account

This reflects your personality, it shows what kind of content you post, along with the kind of people you follow so go through your social media accounts since BuzzFeed has had great significance for your online presence especially on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and many more social media. They won’t like it if you’re social media accounts that have offensive content.

Interview

Clothes to Wear for an Interview

Before going to an interview you need to wear casual attire, the organization’s workplace environment is known to be casual. The appropriate clothes can be a blazer and dress pants. You want to show them how serious you are but at the same time try not to be too stiff and wear clothes that you’re comfortable in. It will help you to be less nervous and more confident.

Learn Their Backstory

You need to be familiar with the organization’s backstory and the kind of content they share. At an interview, you need to know all about BuzzFeed by going through their website. You can even take their quiz and comment on their stories. You also need to look into their mission and vision statement, how they started the organization. Use all this knowledge at the interview to make yourself unique. You can even tell how much you enjoy doing the quizzes, the kind of stories that you like reading.

Why do you want to work for BuzzFeed?

You will be asked why you’re interested in working for Buzzfeed in the interview and it’s important, to be honest, and be sincere while answering the questions. Practice before interviews makes you perfect and stands out from the crowd. You can tell them the reason their workplace environment is what you want the most, on how you want to work in an organization that makes you feel comfortable.

Making Yourself Presentable

You need to show them that you can be a team player and can be collaborative with other employees. You will be in a workplace where you constantly give ideas, work on various projects with other employees. This will show the organization the kind of employee you are, how you are always motivated in the workplace, how you are willing to help other employees while they face a challenge with the customers

Why you’re perfect for the role?

It’s important to be prepared to answer the questions based on the job position you’ve chosen. You need to show the reasons you’re perfect for the role and how this job position is important to you. You can tell them about the kind of work you have done before, you can tell them about your experiences and the kind of skills you have that will fulfill the requirement for the job.

What to expect for personal questions?

During the interview, you need to be expected for the questions based on your personal lives along with the technical questions. You can research the common questions that are generally asked during the interview and the kind of questions that are normally expected to be asked by the interviewer.

What questions to ask?

It’s best to avoid asking questions such as salary range and benefits, you need to show the interviewer how you have the interest to join the organization and not just for benefits or salary range. You can ask what is their name, what is their position, and how long they’ve been working in the organization.

Send a Follow-Up Thank-You Note

After the interview, you need to send an email or write a letter to thank BuzzFeed for the time they’ve taken for the interview. It’s a small gesture but an effective method to make yourself stand out from the crowd. You can mention how much you enjoyed the conversation, and how it would mean so much to be part of BuzzFeed as an employee.

FAQs

Can anyone post on BuzzFeed?

The BuzzFeed Community is where writers or contributors create posts such as quizzes about their movies, or TV show or miss, or any topic related to pop culture and so to become part of the community they need to create an account to make a post. The editors will go through the posts to make sure if it is good and it will be included on the BuzzFeed community page.

When they make a quiz or any post, it needs to be featured with BuzzFeed’s network, the editors will make some editing to make it into their style and tone they will also include the images. It’s very important to check the community on the BuzzFeed website to see if the writers have any doubts about what the community does, what is their purpose, and their mission.

How do I contact BuzzFeed writers?

According to the BuzzFeed website, they are always looking for a story to publish on their site, and it can be about movies or anime. A writer can share work, it can be a video clip or a writing sample, they get paid for their content. All they have to do is send to an email [email protected], once the email is sent it will take about two weeks to respond to the writers. and their pieces will be rates it depends on the topic. They have to make sure to have if they don’t get a response due to difficulties they need to mention it in an email.

Do BuzzFeed contributors get paid?

According to an article from Variety, they have a goal of their fans making quizzes, lists, and more content and making it viral and so they are paying them for submitting their content. The more content their fans submit, they get paid more. It is based on the number of views each post gets. If they get 150,00 views, the contributors will receive $150, and if the post gets 500,000 views, they will earn $500. So the more views the posts get, the more paid contributors will earn.

I would like to conclude that BuzzFeed’s youtube channel has a reputation for a very appealing appeal to youth audiences, from creating viral videos to making popular foods and trying unique experiences.