What was Google thinking?

A new movie starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as two middle-aged interns at Google looks like nothing more than a cringeworthy recruitment video packaged as a summer flick, says Sabrina Zolkifi.

The movie, aptly called 'The Internship', follows Wilson and Vaughn’s characters as they take part in Google’s famous summer internship programme after losing their jobs as watch salesmen.

While the trailer hints at a funny script and a couple of laugh-out-loud moments, the entire thing screams Hollywood-packaged recruitment stunt.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, told CNN the reason the company agreed to the film was because “computer science has a marketing problem”. I’m just not sure a summer movie was the way to go in solving that.

The film was clearly shot as an easy-to-digest flick, but borders on portraying Google’s internship programme as a huge geek party, with Wilson’s character Nick likening the internship to a “mental Hunger Games against a bunch of genius kids for just a handful of jobs”.

“At Google, we actually do have the ability to make more of an impact on people and more of a change in one year than many people do in their lifetimes,” a Google employee is seen saying in front of a group of interns.

The movie also brings to mind 2010’s The Social Network.

Despite the film portraying Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg as a bit of an asshole, it’s made almost no impact on Facebook’s position as an employer of choice (it was voted best employer by Glassdoor this year).

It is along that same vein I highly doubt 'The Internship' will make a dent in Google’s recruitment efforts, but it was an interesting move on the company’s part. Let’s see if their risk pays off.

All images from YouTube.