HIRING AND RETAINING
TALENT
In This Chapter
• Hiring Talent
• Retaining Talent
• Training
6.1 I
NTRODUCTION
H
aving the right mix of talent and personalities who are passionate about
games goes a long way toward making the game a success. A group of
people may work together on a single game for four years or more, and
if they don’t get along or complement each other’s talents, the game’s quality
and chances of success will diminish because more time will be spent managing
personalities than making the game. For instance, the producer or lead should
not spend an excessive amount of time with a team member with a difficult per-
sonality in the hopes that he or she will improve, as this effort takes the produc-
er’s attention away from other critical areas of the game.
As a producer, you may not have hiring or firing privileges, but you gener-
ally will be involved in the interview process and have some influence on who
is hired and added to the team. The hiring process allows you to be selective
about which people eventually become employees. As a producer, you want to
be selective about who is hired, because you will be responsible for dealing with
any personnel issues, such as tardiness, low-quality work, missed deadlines, and
Chapter 6Chapter 6
94 THE GAME PRODUCTION HANDBOOK, 2/E
so on. This chapter presents some general information on hiring, retaining, and
training talent from the producer’s point of view.
6.2 HIRING TALENT
Finding talent can be difficult, especially if you are not located in one of the game
development hubs in California, Washington state, or Texas. However, people with
a talent and passion for making games are more than willing to relocate for the right
opportunity. You have several available resources for finding talent—working with
recruiters, posting job openings on the company website, and recruiting people at
game development conferences and trade shows. Also, keep in mind that the right
person for the job might find you, as there are numerous people interested in mak-
ing games for a living. They may not be experienced enough for some of the more
senior positions, but they might be excellent entry-level talent.
You may have an on-site Human Resources (HR) department who handles
the hiring process, or you may be able to use your publisher’s HR department. In
either case, the HR department is usually the initial point of contact for all poten-
tial candidates and handles the logistics of creating and posting job descriptions,
collecting resumes, coordinating phone interviews, making travel arrangements
for in-person interviews, negotiating salaries, and extending final offers.
The producer is responsible for informing the HR department of the hiring
needs, providing details for the job description, and interviewing prospective
candidates. The producer may also determine who else on the team needs to
interview the candidates.
The interview process begins by looking over submitted resumes and select-
ing a list of prospective candidates for an initial phone interview. The producer
or lead usually conducts this interview and makes a recommendation on whether
this person should be brought in for an on-site interview. If someone is brought
in for an interview, as many people as possible should have the opportunity to
interview him. Ideally, everyone on the team can be involved, but this may not
be possible if there are more than ten people on the team. In larger teams like
these, the main people interfacing with this person on a regular basis should be
involved in the interviewing process.
After the candidate is interviewed, the producer and other people involved
in the process provide feedback on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
This information is used to determine whether to extend an employment offer.
Studio management is also involved in the hiring process and likely has final say
on who gets hired, especially when filling senior positions on the team. Studio
management will especially be involved in the case of a large studio with mul-
tiple projects, as they will assume that the candidate will roll on to other projects
as necessary.
HIRING AND RETAINING TALENT 95
HIRING GOOD EMPLOYEES
Wade Tinney and Coray Seifert
Large Animal Games
Large Animal has set up a reliable and controlled process for screening potential
employees, which cuts down on the time spent interviewing developers and brings the
best candidates to the top of the list. When we are looking to fill a new position, we
post the job description on our website along with an online questionnaire that each
applicant must answer before uploading their resume. They include questions such as,
“Have you worked on a game project?” to “What are the last three games you played?”
and “What’s the best job you’ve had, and why did you like it?” This questionnaire
serves as a good filter, giving us a more accurate sense of an applicant’s personality,
communication skills, and professionalism than a resume can provide.
We had more than 150 responses to an ad that was posted recently for an artist—
an overwhelming response for a small company like ours. By using the questionnaire,
we were able to narrow down the list to 10 candidates targeted for phone interviews.
For example, many people on the list were quickly eliminated because of their unpro-
fessional responses to the questions, which often included typos and poor grammar.
These responses indicated that the person was not that serious or passionate about the
position and had a low attention to detail. When we had a short list of 10 candidates,
we asked them for references and followed up with at least two of those people for
each candidate. Then we did short 10-minute phone interviews, and finally, had in-
person interviews with six applicants.
Like most companies, retaining people is an issue for us but no one who has
worked here for longer than six months has ever left. Quite simply, we want Large
Animal to be the best job that our employees will ever have. We cultivate an atmo-
sphere that is both fun and challenging and want employees to have a quality of life
that is better than they would have at larger game companies that can afford to pay
higher salaries. All of the employees have worked for large companies in the past and
have made a conscious choice to remain small so they can preserve the strong sense of
camaraderie and creative involvement. Since casual, downloadable games are much
smaller than a typical retail title, employees at Large Animal have the opportunity
to work on a much greater variety of projects than they would at a traditional PC or
console developer.
Screening Resumes
Screening resumes and reviewing portfolios is the first step in narrowing down
a pool of potential candidates. When looking at resumes, make note of whether
96 THE GAME PRODUCTION HANDBOOK, 2/E
the candidate’s work history has any major gaps—this could indicate that he was
fired, and it took a while for him to find another position, or that he took time off
to go back to school, was laid off, or needed time to attend to personal matters.
You will want to ask the candidate about any gaps in employment during the
initial phone interview.
If the candidate has a history of hopping between jobs—six months at one
company, one year at another company—consider it a red flag. The candidate
may not be very dedicated to his job and is more interested in salary increases
or has a hard time staying employed. On the other hand, he could have had a
run of bad luck with lay-offs at several companies in a row or not be very good at
evaluating companies to work for.
If a candidate lists shipped title credits on the resume, don’t feel guilty about
double-checking them. It is not unheard of for people to exaggerate (or even
outright lie) about their contribution to a game. Moby Games (www.mobyg-
ames.com) is a website that lists game credits and is a good starting place to
check this information. Moby Games is not a comprehensive list by any means
so if the credits aren’t listed there, don’t assume the worst.
Additionally, you might want to check out what type of reviews the can-
didate’s titles received, especially if you are looking to fill a lead position, and
this person has a lead credit on other titles. If the games consistently have poor
reviews, ask the candidate about the game and the reviews if you choose to inter-
view him. GameRankings.com (www.gamerankings.com) and Metacritic (www.
metacritic.com) are both useful online databases with game reviews.
Pay attention to how the candidate describes his job responsibilities at pre-
vious jobs. If the descriptions contain little information (but uses many words)
or the information seems repetitive, he might be padding what his actual duties
were on the game. Be especially wary of any outrageous claims that don’t seem
to fit with the job title, such as a scripter stating, “completely redesigned the
single-player aspects of the game during production.” You will definitely want to
get more information on things like this during the phone interview so you don’t
end up hiring someone you thought was the creative director on the game, but
instead was the lead gameplay scripter.
Finally, pay attention to how much industry experience the candidate has.
You probably won’t want be interested in hiring someone with absolutely no
experience for an intermediate position on a team, although there are some ex-
ceptions. If you are looking to hire someone entry-level, you might be open to
looking at someone with no industry experience, but try to determine whether
a candidate’s previous work experience prepares him for an entry-level position.
Also, does this person play games? Although this may not be a huge factor for
certain positions, you do want someone who enjoys having fun and has a general
understanding of games.
HIRING AND RETAINING TALENT 97
THE INTERVIEW PROCESS
Melanie Cambron, Game Recruiter
The interviewing process really begins with the resume. When screening
resumes, look for a career that has made a logical progression. The game industry
is volatile, and layoffs are very common, so a history of rapid job changes does
not always spell trouble, as it might in other industries. Nevertheless, you need
to exercise caution because you don’t want a new employee who jumps ship in
30 days. A solid candidate is someone with an education, who has worked in the
industry for a while, has shown good stability and growth at each prior company,
and has successfully shipped well-received titles. Furthermore, look for people
whose salary and job expectations match up with their experience and sought
position.
Next, for those candidates who make it past the resume screen and into the
interview, it is important to remember that not only is the company evaluating
the candidate, but the candidate is also evaluating the company. It is crucial that
all key team members interview the candidate, particularly those who will be com-
municating and working with this person on a regular basis, and it is also important
that those same team members check their egos at the door. Often, younger team
members take the interview opportunity to flex their power in a less than favorable
fashion. Although it’s vital to really get to the meat and potatoes of a candidate, it’s
just as vital to do so without arrogance. To get the key talent you want, the company
needs to be perceived as welcoming.
The company must also be perceived as “smart,” so prepare the team to prop-
erly interview. Make sure that everyone has an understanding of the basic questions
to ask during the interview to elicit details on the candidate’s skill set and how he
has interacted with people and teams in the past. Go over these questions with team
members before the interview.
When the interviewing is completed, it’s time to analyze the results. If you have
multiple people interviewing a candidate, you will rarely get a 100 percent con-
sensus on whether to hire a candidate, so you must weigh the opinions based on
several factors including the interviewer’s position on the team, the working rela-
tionship the interviewer would have to the potential employee, and how much you
trust the interviewer’s ability to judge character and skills. Investigate why those
who said “no” did so. Are their objections reasonable? If possible, it is an excellent
idea to gather the interviewers together and discuss the prospective candidate in a
roundtable forum. This helps elicit a more well-rounded perspective, and you might
discover the candidate gave different information to different people.
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