[Note: Also featured on author's personal blog: odiousrepeater.wordpress.com]

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 15 or so years in the games industry, it’s that few aspects of the business are paid as much lip service as hiring.

“Yes”, your prospective boss may tell you as they take you on a tour of the office, “hiring is extremely important. Hiring is ultimately how we maintain our culture and value creation capacity, while at the same time ensuring that we have the drive and flexibility needed to pivot when the market so demands – and also to beat that same market to the punch through everyday grassroots innovations”.

So far, so good, you think. A bit bureaucratic an answer perhaps, but the theory seems on-point.

And then they introduce you to Jane, the company’s lone in-house recruiter. Jane has been left to her own devices to dig up potential candidates or at the very least ensure that the candidates find her. She is also expected to manage all the vetting and stage 1 interviewing of every single eligible and interested candidate, regardless of subject matter area. Additionally, she is not allowed to use outside agencies to track candidates down. Too expensive, you see.

As you start looking around for the nearest fire escape, or at the very least a window to jump out of, you’re told by your host in a magnanimous tone of voice that Jane “has one of those fancy LinkedIn Pro accounts”. When you ask how many people she’s expected to recruit this fiscal year you quickly wish you hadn’t.

It’s a caricature, but one that most of us with hiring experience have, at least partially, experienced in real life. The reason it’s so common is because the underlying reasons are often the same. They include a lack of understanding of how much work is actually required in order to bring good staff through the door, as well as outright arrogance; thinking that the reputation of the company will magically attract the right people. The filtering process and negotiation phases are also routinely under-estimated, as well as what happens once the candidate has actually commenced working at the company.

I have, however, yet to meet anyone who claimed that having the right staff is not important. Many people just suck at attracting and hiring said staff. So I thought I’d put together a list of my own personal best practices for not only “doing hiring the right way”, but more importantly “doing games industry hiring the right way”.

Bad Practices

The process I outline later in this article is written in a “do” format, but I thought I’d get a couple of “don’ts” out of the way first. The reason is that these are so common, and so harmful, that even if the rest of my list implicitly covers them, I don’t want to risk anyone failing to read between the lines and fatally damaging their project or company in the process. The number one “don’t” is…

Don‘t Do “Track Record Hires”

When I say “Track Record Hires”, I mean the kind where you start frothing at the mouth over a candidate’s CV, making up your mind right then and there. Take it from me rather than learning this the hard way: the number and perceived quality of projects and past employers is among the least interesting things to track when trying to identify your next hire. The reasons are numerous; there are plenty of people who lie and exaggerate on their CVs, there are many projects that have been delivered in spite of – rather than thanks to – the individuals involved, and so on and so forth. You really can’t count on an impressive track record to accomplish anything beyond hiking up the salary expectations of the candidate substantially, so even if the person seems to be a brilliant fit “on paper”, your work has only just begun. In fact a more senior and experienced is more likely to be incompatible and unmalleable than a more junior person – as seniority often brings rigidity and “knowing what is right from experience”.

That’s all I’m saying about this one. Buyer beware!

I've a feeling the guy on the right had an impressive CV. He definitely does now.

Don’t Do Simplistic Budgeting

If you don’t consider all the factors when allocating time, effort and resources to the hiring process, you will get terrible results, one way or the other. Sometimes, an overly simplistic model is less useful than no model at all, as it’ll skew your expectations and make for poorly informed decisions. Overestimating your hiring rate by even 10% may well lead to disproportionate losses of productivity, for reasons you won’t understand except maybe after the fact.

Let’s revisit Jane from the intro again. Jane wasn’t allowed to enlist the help of staffing agencies in finding the right candidates. The 15-20% commission on the first yearly salary was deemed too expensive by management. Indeed, let’s assume that it’s the higher number, and that the candidate would earn €40 000 a year. That’s an €8000 commission – quite a hefty chunk of change!

Except it’s only hefty if considered completely out of context. Let’s assume for a second that Jane the recruiter also makes €40 000 per year. For a candidate to be “too expensive” in coming from an external agency, we’d have to assume that Jane can find that same candidate – or a better one – if she only puts in the equivalent of 2.4 months’ additional work. That’s what €8000 amounts to.

There are quite a few problems with this model, including…

Hopefully I’ve made the point well enough. Don’t be, as we say in Sweden, “stupidly frugal”; saving a cent now to spend a euro later. If you think paying an agency 20% is expensive, imagine having your engine team idling for 2 months in anticipation of the CTO you promised them.

Word.

The Right Way

With the “don’ts” out of the way, let’s have a look at the “dos”.

Step 1: Prepare

Perhaps unsurprisingly, before you start putting time, effort and money towards staffing your company up, a bit of planning goes a long way. The amount of planning you need to do will vary; perhaps you’re a brand-new studio staffing up from scratch or maybe you’re just adding a project team or even just one new individual at an arbitrary point in time. With that in mind, there are a few things you should always do to some extent.

Define your hiring needs

What role are you hiring for and why? How many of them? For which project? What’s the timeline of that project? By when do you need the new employee to be productive? What happens if they are not; how do hiring delays scale? What is the priority of this role relative to other roles for other projects? These are just a few examples of the kinds of questions you should be asking in order to more effectively tackle the next step.

Define your hiring constraints

The hiring constraints include everything from the aforementioned use of external recruiters to the salary brackets, relocation packages and any other incentives, as well as any technology or other resources you might need. Another way of thinking about it is “what tools do we have available to us to identify and attract the right candidates”, and this question must always be tightly connected to the business realities of your organization. Tying it to some sort of abstract goal like “only hiring the best people” will seem like a rational way forward, but you’ll find that it does little in helping you focus and define a strategy. Look towards hiring the right people, for your organization and for the reality in which it operates.

This image is about fitness. But really, it can be applied to business goals too.

Get organized

I’ve seen this step messed up by people who really should’ve known better. At one studio where I was made department hiring manager I quickly found that candidates were being tracked in giant mind map saved locally on a department head’s computer. Communication with and about the candidate was handled through emailing.

To use management speak – this did not scale. The studio was struggling to hire even 30 people in one year. While this did correspond to a sizable increase in their workforce, they had delegated much of the work throughout the organization. It should have been faster, but much was lost in painfully slow turnaround times and “fumbles”, mostly stemming from disorganization.

After I’d done an inventory of the situation, I decided to put my foot down and set up a ticketing system with a custom, simple workflow in Jira – which we already used for other purposes within the organization. It worked beautifully; each candidate got their own ticket, categorized and tagged depending on their area of expertise and the team they were interviewing with. Comments were added to the tickets themselves and the only emails that got sent around were from that system, letting people know when new candidates, comments or other edits arrived. The system also allowed for attachments of CVs and other relevant files. A cool bonus was that HR and hiring managers throughout the company could see every candidate in the database and inform each other that “if he’s not a fit for your team, I’d like to interview him for mine”, and vice versa. This kind of transparency is hard to expect from “organic” word-of-mouth between hiring managers.

There are loads of tools available to help with this kind of practical stuff. There are whole HR suites that require little configuration, and that go beyond just recruitment; they have every conceivable talent management tool built-in, and are as expensive as you’d expect. It all comes down to your needs and constraints. But even on a slim budget, something like Trello will make your lives so much easier than sending emails back and forth.

Trust me, set it up early.

Step 2: Identify and Attract

The next step is to start putting actual people through the pipeline you’ve set up. For this to be possible, you either have to find them – or they have to find you.

Either way, spending a healthy amount of time and effort on the actual job spec is going to make things much easier. This doesn’t just mean being clear and unambiguous about what tasks you need performed; it also means accounting for the hiring market at this given point in time, as well as the growth ambitions of the company.

You’ll find that trying to attract Level Designers with console and first person shooter experience is a different challenge today than it was just five years ago. Also, if you happen to be working in the Unity engine, but hope to move to a different set of tools in the future, you’d do well to note that a “programmer” is generally not the same as a “Unity programmer”. Many of the latter are surprisingly ineffective outside of the Unity ecosystem.

Ensure that your job spec includes the following:

Finally, take this opportunity to sell the company, not just the position. If all you’re talking about is the day-to-day work the candidate’s expected to do, you’re quite likely to get the kinds of candidates that are running from something, rather than to you. Many of the best candidates are those who are not looking for a change of job – but could be convinced to change environments and, especially, cultures.

When doing this, try to be original – and by that I mean try to respect your audience. None of us want to read “work hard, play hard” ever again. It really tells us very little