Getting Hired with a Personal Touch

[Music] so we're going to talk about getting hired today so we're going to start with a quick poll here how many of you have applied for a job before lots of people great and how many of you guys have got no response at all oh wow okay that's that's tough how many people have done a work test before okay slightly fewer people how many people have made it to a second interview that's good there's hope all right so you want to be a developer there's a lot of things working against us right now you we just gotten out of a pandemic a lot of the people here look like maybe they've been in school recently maybe some of your school was done online you didn't have a chance to meet people face to face make eye contact UM communicating is tough even if you have been doing it your whole life um applying for a job is tough you have to a portfolio and now we

got to worry about tech maybe coming for our jobs and replacing us you know with AI never fear I am here to help you today and in the future so why me I've been doing hiring since 2008 I have hired programmers artists QA all disciplines Under the Sun I've done hiring in Japan I've done hiring in Sweden I've worked with um trade schools I reviewed probably close to a thousand job applications I've had hundreds of interviews I have seen it all under the sun I'm a creative director of Ichigo EA which is an indie studio in Stockholm and I've built games over time through Japan and Sweden mostly music games I love music um and music software um our studio has a couple titles out um but today we're going to be talking about the dos and don'ts of how to get a job uh we're going to go through five potential phases of interviewing for a job and we're going to look at some examples of behaviors that can help you or behaviors that might kind of get in

your way and slow you down now this is my hiring process of course every company does a little bit differently um but the principles I'm talking about is personto person communication and adding value to a worker employee relationship and that works whether you're in a company of five people or 20,000 regardless of of which country it's in so let's start with phase one that job submission the application submission we talked about a second ago so you sent it out and then you got no reply it's so easy to find jobs in terms of the number of jobs you can find there's lots of scrapers that are out there that are pulling them off of LinkedIn I don't even have to advertise um Bots do that for me um maybe uh you've applied and the timing is wrong if you guys are in school right now maybe you're trying to get an internship or you want something fresh um if you tell me between March and may that's helpful because then I have context of when you want to start working but if it's past the end of January it's not helpful because I make most of my hiring decisions half a year um sometimes a year in advance you know there's there

just I need that kind of runway in terms of how my Staffing is going to be so try to be flexible maybe your school allows you to do the internship later maybe you can start a couple months later do extra semester something like that a lot of the things I'm going to talk about today are about personal connection um nobody likes to be treated like a number uh you guys certainly don't I don't either I don't like my company to feel like a number one of 100 companies which you've applied to and haven't really given a lot of thought to so um when you do apply you are starting a process from the moment you hit that button you are simulating yourself as an employee of my uh company and the way you conduct yourself in that uh entire experience is going to tell me whether I think we would be a good fit for each other so um when you have that application don't skip the instructions don't apply if you meet any core requirements I've gotten applications for like social media marketer from a programmer who has nothing on their resume at all that would suggest they know anything about social media marketing um don't use AI generated text please I know it might be like tempting

to get a way out and maybe you feel not so confident in your own communication skills um but I will take um your strange English over a robot strange English any day um I want to hear from you I want to know what you're thinking don't copy the email body out of your cover letter either use one or the other or make them different um and don't make a bad first impression because I get everything right I'm the hiring manager I'm also the the marketing guy so I get the email it says Bob followed you on Instagram I go okay let's check out Bob click on on his profile and it's like him and a bunch of like Gore makeup from Halloween and you know last year or something like that it's his personal Instagram he likes our company great but now I'm seeing Bob with Gore makeup oh another email here's an application who's this from oh it's from Bob and now I have the CV and I have this person who's trying to be professional and talk to me about the job but I have this picture in my mind of Bob and Gore makeup at the top of his Instagram you know so if you're going to follow us on social media do it with an account that looks professional right um is it's hard for me to separate those two

uh there's lots of Hallmarks of a low effort cover letter I get all kinds of things thrown back sometimes like there's the catchphrase from my website oh you look went to our website and copied some text great but then you show that you don't have any understanding of what it means like I say weird things all the time that's me because I'm weird so it's easy for me to catch these kind of stuff I see the job um title I'm applying for conceptually charismatic illustrator parenthesis intern you know I got these really weird job names and then there's no comment at all about how weird the name is so it's obvious it's just being thrown in here um and it's it's one on a deck uh sometimes people have multiple fonts with different colors it's obvious something has been copied and pasted from different places if you're not um scrutinizing and and detail oriented when you're applying for your job I can't expect you're going to be detail oriented and scrutinizing when you're working for me either and that's kind of a red flag the last thing is that maybe the content is all about um the applicant the applicant I I really want to hear why you're a great fit but you need to tell me why you're great fit

for us not all the stuff that you've done right away there needs to be some kind of give and take um in this relationship so if you take the time to do a little research on the company in advance you can you can get a lot more mileage out of this um are there demos on Steam yes all of our games have free demos on Steve you can play them um try those out for 10 minutes and then see what you think see if you'd like to make those kind of games uh what's the tone in the messaging on the company's website is it friendly is it professional is it kind of you know aggro is it all about doing like the best possible cool modeling whatever it is um talk about your strengths in the context of the job listing so okay you have experience doing X Y and Z modeling or programming AI for enemies great how would that help us in our games I could see how my enemy programming skills could make a next level of bad guys to tackle and BackBeat in that franchise or something like that um try to make a personal connection uh it is a person in their side I promise it's me uh so

you know think about me think about how we can start some kind of Rapport or something if you're insecure about something bring it up don't try to hide it so if you are that programmer that applied for the marketing position that's fine but you should say I know my CV is like nothing but C and C++ but I really love data analytics and I really love Instagram so I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to to try something new in games development and to grow fine great now now you know where you're coming from and I know you're aware of that that's great awareness is a very important thing here's a cover letter that makes me stop um I get lots and lots of cover letters this is a really weird one it's one of the weirdest I've ever gotten and I mean that in a good way um this is the kind of cover letter that I pass around to people in the office and I'm like look at this person they went so far as they drew a map from their house to the office and like telling me how long the commute is going to be and they've like this is one part of a bigger board where it's like this kind of criminal detective who is the culprit and the culprit is the person applying um and they're applying for our job maybe they

did this for 10 other companies um and they just copied and changed the text inside I don't care because this is so weird and it requires so much originality and and and and thought that I'm happy to get this and it's got me talking about it persistence May pay off um if it's the right kind of persistence I get a lot of mails like hi sing for XYZ looks perfect for me I want to apply okay again there was no personal connection there you didn't talk about my you didn't really seem to me like you were thinking about how you could be working at my place but then two weeks later the same person says you know I just wanted to follow up in case my application got lost in the stack you know I was thinking about Backbeats protagonist watts and the thing is she's trying to keep together a band and oh wow okay this person has stopped they read the steam page they very likely may have even played the game okay great and now they're talking to me about the game that I made you know so I don't feel like a number anymore now I feel special because I'm being valued and that made makes me want to Value you even more

because now I want to have a conversation about this kind of person that thinks our wacky games could be interesting to work on for them so let's say that you did the application and it was personal enough and you connected with me um and now we're going to have a first round interview and what I usually do is a screening interview it's can be video it can be on site if you're nearby it's probably at most 30 minutes long um as little as 15 and what I want to do is see if we mesh I just want to talk to you I want to make eye contact I want to hear your voice I want to hear what's important to you you're going to come by I could ask you all kinds of things about yourself because my mother always told me people love talking about themselves and they probably do in a social context but not when they're being grilled an interview but I'm going to ask anyway I'm going to say tell me about yourself tell me a game you played in the last year tell me about your best group project if you've been in school recently um and I'm going to ask of these things what what are some strong points what are some ways these things

could be better we're looking for critical evaluation here both on yourself and also on other people's competing products and I'm going to ask if you have questions for me and I certainly hope that you do because if you've thought about this um there definitely should be some questions now leaping off points for conversation don't show up more than five minutes early to an interview um that's just trouble for both of us I know people are nervous you make sure you found the right place but if you show up 15 minutes early then I got to stop whatever it is I'm working on you know go out to the street let you in through the security doors sit you down in the conference room get you a cup of coffee or something and then you're going to sit there and stew while I go back to my desk and get ready for the meeting because it was supposed to start at 3: not 2:45 um the good thing to do is get there early absolutely find the front door then immediately walk away go down the street go to Espresso house or Starbucks or whatever sit there and get ready and prep yourself in your own mind space until 5 minutes I ride 5 minutes early then knock on the door um and and come on in don't SHP don't ramble on and don't give non- answers to questions

if I ask a yes or no question a yes or no answer is really good explanations are fine but if I say are you looking for an internship that will give you course credit and you come back with well I'm in Stockholm right now finishing my internship and I have this remote course that I'm doing and I want to be an intern okay you didn't listen to my question or you didn't process that this is this is some kind of Disconnect going on here take a breath listen to what I asked process it come back um don't blame other team members or bosses that you've had in the past for failures why why are you leav in company XYZ oh because they never listened to me or I never got to contribute or this or that or um why did this project not go well you said it was a disaster well we had this really difficult person in there and you know um it's a team effort all the time uh ow up to to being a part of the the process um and be able to have a holistic view on on how you fit in with everyone else um be respectful of my time time is

the most valuable resource I have ask me how much I have just because I told you the interview was 30 minutes long two weeks ago maybe I don't have 30 minutes right now and if you're going to say hi thank you for today how much time do we have well actually I have something else that's like an important thing that came in I got to go home early and um but yeah so we we'll make it 20 if that's all right uh tell me about your values be able to be intros introspective about your contributions and be able to be critical of other games there's like kind of a trap here I ask people what's your favorite what's what's one game you played in the last year and they say oh it was a breath of the wild here's the kingdom great what's great about it oh it has the great best lighting and the cell shading and and what how could they improve it I I loved it so much I can't really think of that right uh more content and I no okay yeah um you need to be able to be critical of our art um as the game developer so you need to be able to separate the love and the emotion from from evaluating things objectively um if you can't answer these kind of questions sit down and think about them a bit

more so let's say we had a good mesh in our first meeting you want to keep working with me I am interested in working with you um so we're going to do a work test and I'm not going to talk about whether work tests are ethical or not or they should be paid or not that's a entirely different talk but we're just going to assume for argument sake that you're doing one when you do a work test don't start without reading the entire brief several times don't go off on a tangent and just do what you want to do if you're a modeler you're like oh yes I got to make a character if you're a programmer yes anyi those is that is the road to ruin um because then when you do that you get caught up in the moment you'll skip instructions you might leave out information uh you should go through it again and again and again um and do some things before you you start ask for clarification on vague things um I've refined my work tests

over many years to try to make them less vague but some things were still intentionally vague because I want to see how people deal with ambiguity uh it's perfectly fine to ask questions it's never bad to ask questions do it before you start do it in the middle it doesn't matter to me uh be thorough and document your time again like I said we're simulating you working at my company right and if you're going to be working as a professional at a game developer you need to keep track of your time you need to estimate your work keep track of where which part went to which phase um and document your assumptions get feedback H your risks things like that take a second and do a compassion exercise you can look at the look at the prompt you still haven't started yet and you're thinking there okay how could I make this as easy as possible for the person who's going to receive it to review how busy is this person is it the HR manager is an art director is a lead programmer what could go wrong something in the time or the location Maybe maybe they have some difficulty getting access to some of the

things that I've sent on think a bit deeper who is it is it the person I'm emailing with is it Dave is it someone on Dave's team you could ask those things is he a Mac guy is it a Windows person do they have the same tools what if they're at a conference when they get my materials what if one of the files is corrupted what if the Dropbox link was Private you know what if they can't open one of the codecs and one of the video files that I sent or something like that there's lots of things that can go wrong here some of these things you can ask for clarification in advance some things you can head your bets a great mentor of mine always said that you have at least two or three backups whenever you do something really important like a presentation or sending in an assignment give me so many different kinds of data that there's no way I'm not going to be able to open it because maybe I'm going through my 10th um work test today and if the Dropbox link is private then it's like okay yeah maybe I'll come back to this next week

you can check some of the stuff with a private browser window you could use a different folder on your machine sometimes you have a space in the path to your username or you have a special character things like that Windows machines usually terrible that kind of stuff simulate all the ways it can go wrong stop to think about the task this is the why why am I being asked to make a walk cycle why am I being asked to create a state machine what kind of characters do they have in their games what kind of game logic does it use is this request similar to the things that they have produced before were there any images provided in the the task if they were why what things were lacking images again most of these things are assumptions so you should document them getting a document which tells me about where the time went what you did and what you assumed is incredibly important because that's part of the process of working on something my ideal work test package is you follow the directions of course there might be times where you need a deviate or maybe you have a spark of

inspiration if you are going to deviate acknowledge the fact be honest about it um and explain why it can open on any kind of machine give me three different levels of files give me the source file give me the immediate file give me some works on any kind of device file like screenshots it should be a minimal amount of fuss from me interview stuff imagine if you give me an animation I say okay give me a walk cycle don't give me a one second video because that's a single cycle of the motion and now I have to like go through my software and find where the loop key is on on VLC or QuickTime or whatever and on top of that you are also assuming that that software is going to Loop cleanly and I'm not going to see a hitch when that animation happens don't leave that to someone else solve that problem yourself export a video with several Loops eight Loops that's fine um if I ask you for two different kinds of animations of like a side by side of a lazy walk and a confident walk um you're giving me two motions put them in the same video do

some kind of fly around or something with the the Maya camera you know splice that stuff together so I can see all the differences um very easily and of course give me documentation documentation is important because it's practice communicating when you come to the company and you're creating programs or software designs or art other people going to be using them because we are a company so your ability to communicate what you've done and why you did it the way you do is incredibly important so let's say that the work test was not a disaster and then we have a follow-up interview this is going to be more in depth hopefully on site when you come don't make excuses about the programs that you have um don't tell me about how Unity was crashing or Maya wasn't working or Windows was was junk um and don't come in unprepared to talk about the test thoroughly because we're going to be discussing this thing that you invested your precious time in and I invested my precious time in evaluating and we're going to see what it's like um and we

need to look at this from all different kinds of angles to see what would it be like if we work together if we were a team I could ask you some other things not related to the test um I could ask you about your strengths and weaknesses as a team member this is about that empathy and awareness thing again because I want to know how you work with others um not how you are um in a vacuum necessarily uh I might ask you personality in three words this is another one of those little gotchas because I use the number three three means three sometimes people come up with four or five and just keep going like no no stop three is enough um what you value in other people what's important to you and other humans that you want to spend time with what's your career goal if you can't answer these kind of things on the Fly that's okay and this is actually kind of a bonus option to get extra credit here because um it's all right to say I don't know and the correct response is I don't know can I get back to you on that sure and then 4 hours later 8 hours later tomorrow tomorrow doesn't matter in in a reasonable short

amount of time follow up email me you know Dave I was thinking what you ask me um what I value in other people I didn't have a good answer at the moment but I've thought about it some more end so now we've got communication we've got back and forth you're valuing Me by showing that my question to you was worthy of your time to think about outside of the realm of that interview and your following up that's the same kind of thing you do all the time in the company you know you if you don't know the answer you just acknowled you say that you go back you dig you find the answer you come back and you you follow up that's how we solve things do build on what we talked about the last time um take notes everyone should take notes um whether they're written or digital or something like that come back and and tell me about uh things that we talked about previously maybe some new ideas about that ask me directly what I thought about the work David you know what what do you think did I did I fulfill the objective of creating the character the way that you want it you know and I will be honest with you I'll say well you know the

topology was like this and da da da cell shading Etc um tell me what you think about my evaluation you know that's just my evaluation it's not like it's it's it's Canon it's coming out of the Bible or something like that um I've been doing this a long time and I have ideas about what works from my way of doing things uh but I appreciate fresh ideas and I appreciate an open mind from you too and if we can have a dialogue about that that's great another great thing you can do is you can repeat back to what I just said this is a great way to check both that you understand what the other person is talking about and also to Value them when you're having the conversation I hear that you say the topology was not so great for cell shading I think that and you know then you continue on on how you know the way you built it the way it was or whatever it might be that I say no no no I said topology was good for cell shading or no I didn't say it shouldn't be orthogonal it should be tangential or something like that or then maybe we discover someplace where we misheard each other misunderstood um now we're working hard to our communication the two of us

together a potential future team finally there's all those times in between like I said from the moment that you you know follow us on social media or you hit that submit button you were running the simulation of what it's like to be Alice working at Ichigo um so uh the way you conduct yourself even when you don't uh is important um don't play games pretending to be sick I know sometimes like there's a job fair and you get like an intern offer and then me and you know three other companies that you like all ask you to do a work test and you can't do them all at once obviously but you don't want to lose the chance to work for me so you kind of tell me you'll do it the next week and then like Friday comes around like ah you know my pet got sick and I had to go back and take care of my mother and this kind of you know I mean I can smell this stuff i' I've been reading these things and having this conversations long enough I would much prefer if you were just honest and said you know I really like to work at Paradox and I'm doing work tests from them right now I give it my all um I will have an answer from them whether I go to the next round or Not by Tuesday

they've told me can I do a work test work test after that sure of course you're not going to hurt my feelings you're not going to be lesser in my ranking of potential candidates because you're honest with me about where you want to work that's fine what I want is ultimately I want people to work at my company that want to work there I don't have to be your first choice but if you are really motivated and you can see it potentially working out then that's great let's work on that together but I do prefer professionalism and being transparent about things and I'll do the same for you um be careful with shooting off one line replies this is the reading instructions thing this happens all the time someone sends me something out of the blue I write back with a clarifying single yes or no question and then I get something with no introduction no bottom and then it didn't answer my question either kind kind and it's like five minutes later you know heat in the moment I understand oh my God I got to reply no no stop take a breath step back think about what's going on here then reply be creative be transparent be persistent

but respectful and be personal and empathetic because it's teams that make games that's what companies are it's teams of people working together and I want to work with empathetic talented excited people just like you ask for feedback on everything about how you interview about your application about your email mean it and I will happy to give you uh feedback on what I think about all these things so to wrap up like I said from the first moment you contact us you're simulating yourself as an employee and some companies may want Mad Skills um but for me easy to work with people people that communicate people with great character that want to work together and respect each other are the best kind of people and that's the best kind of people for the job for me here's some good books I'm not going to read them all out um these slides will go up later I'll put them on the website or something I just wanted to say thank you to U my

team to all of our developers to all of our student interns to our schools um and to our accelerator Baltic explorers you guys are fantastic hello back there in Sweden and Japan miss you so much um you can learn more about our company uh you can follow me on the Medias and things like that so I think we have a couple minutes for questions there's any thank you so much if you have a question please come up to one of the two mics yes uh great talk thank you I was curious whether you had any particular advice or whether your advice changes in any way for entrylevel jobs specifically the question is um if I have any particular advice for entry level jobs so I was kind of talking mostly from an entry level position to be

honest in during this talk um a lot of the people in our company are junior people straight out of school so I think what I've said here is is totally real I understand you guys don't have a lot of experience so building a portfolio is really tough and I get that um so don't worry about that part just present yourself professionally and be open with me and I think that's that'll that'll be a good start yes this side um hi this is a great talk thank you um I was curious how much you value like thank you emails after interviews I've heard about those before but I didn't really know they were a thing I was just curious if they're actually used in industry or not I always say thank you I say thank you to my clients when I'm following up I say thank you to the places where I have one-on-one person relationships it doesn't take a whole lot of effort you don't have to do something special there um a small thank you is fine and it it definitely does help yes thank you yes meta hi uh it was a really good talk I

enjoyed it um I'm a student right now I'm about to graduate this year and I've been starting to write on my resume but I don't really have like like I don't have like jobs like experience so I wanted to put like education like what like courses would you recommend putting in in your resume for education do you have any group projects that you do in school yeah now that's what I would reference uhhuh so I would talk about okay these courses had group projects and then if you want to add in like how you help someone else look good or how how the team came together to create a great result or something like that those are the kind of things that would catch my eye all right thank you yes hi um first of all just wanted to say thank you for all this it was insanely insightful um I wanted to ask what your thoughts are on applying for multiple roles at a company whether or not you should be honest and upfront about that from the beginning or if it's something to reserve and ask later if a position doesn't work out

that's a good question I think that if you apply to multiple positions it could run the risk of looking that kind of shotgun approach for like hey I'm trying to get any kind of job I can or something so what I would do is I would apply for the one you think fits best and then maybe in your cover letter in the last sentence or something it's like I'm also interested in this thing and then if you feel you're qualified for position you can talk about it there but only do the application once and and Target it towards what you're strongest with sweet thank you MH yes hi uh firstly thank you for the talk and your time it's greatly appreciated uh when looking to hire an artist what format do you prefer to see your portfolio in do you prefer PDF art station website or any of those art station is easiest for me because with PDF it's like depending what screen I'm looking at it could be kind of stretched out I can't see it on the screen at once like art station like they have their best stuff up at the top hopefully and it's it's gathered together there and that's like my my first kind of you know cut thank you yes

hello um so you talked a lot about being honest in your interview and in questions and just considering like your strengths and weaknesses as part of a project or past experience um what do you think would be like a bad answer or an answer that doesn't give you a good input from a candidate talking about their strengths and weaknesses I think when people say like I'm a perfectionist or I work too much or I never stop working and then things like that the ones that kind of sound kind of boasty I guess are the ones that kind of turn me off a little bit I definitely appreciate diligence and working to get the job done um but I think that you need to have a tempered understanding of how that can also become a negative thing as well you know your strength can soon become your weakness if it does consume you and you do end up like overworking yourself or burning out and those kind of things so it's hard when you're you know 20 years old or so to have an awareness of that kind of stuff but but trying to look at it with a tempered View and try to do that empathy exercise again simulate how how could this be bad or how could this go wrong

or something like that kind of Imagining the risk yeah thank you thank you very much yes um thank you so much for your time as well and I wanted to talk about uh resume and CVS I've seen that a lot of people uh do a lot of designs or work or they just say no just go with one column CV resume um what would you suggest is the most professional way but as well the most attractive way to send a CV or resume okay so the question is what's the most effective way to send a CV or resume I'm not really too picky about that stuff as long as it's clean um if you're applying for graphic position and you don't have a control over like layout colors and fonts then I'm really going to raise an eyebrow and wonder um is this is this a good match you're a programmer I'm a bit more like lenient on those kind of things but if it's clean if it's organized and it's easy to read it's a same thing as like a game UI so like evaluate your CB as if it was a game UI and see if that's that works for you that works and thank you thank you very much yes hi uh thank you for your talk

and I was wondering I'm making a career change into the game in industry and I was wondering like uh does the game industry doesn't like these kind of resumés or CVS that's like too formal cuz I'm from office work background and for our resumés and stuff we don't write our weakness or we don't be that honest we just write like what school we went to and like R GPA and stuff but we're while hearing from you I believe like game's bit different right so you're asking you're coming from the industry maybe you're worried about the application being too formal I want to clarify a point that maybe I wasn't clear on is that when I say strength and weakness stuff like that you don't need to put that kind of stuff on your resume or CV like putting it there is is not going to add anything I'll ask you about it but I don't expect to see it on a resume a resume is a very formal kind of thing it's bullet points it's history and it has information relevant experience relevant for the job um the cover letter is the opportunity for you to become personal I would say the cover letter is a chance to be passionate um

because in my experience if you're not a passionate game developer you're not going to go very far uh so this is your chance to tell us why games are so important to you and why you want to be involved making them all right thank you thank you hello um just uh maybe like one or two more and then we should start wrapping up okay do we have an aloh we can go to or yes yes you'll be able to ask all those questions outside of this room we just need to start clearing out we'll do one more we'll do one more question then we'll I'll go I'll go fast than thank you for your insightful talk um I had a question about uh your the cover letter example that you wrote or that you put up it was very cool very artistic and um as a student we get a lot of advice to sort of standardize our cover letters or our resumés to avoid um getting thrown out by AI uh selection processes so I was wondering if you had any advice on that and if you would suggest sticking with the artistic route and just ignoring the AI this is chance to employ okay so the question was could

a could a creative cover letter be too creative and get f up by AI this is a chance to cover your bases like I said before about the like the work test give me two formats so give me a normal text based cover letter and then do something creative that looked like whatever or something like that um and hopefully that I mean I don't I'm not AI I don't know what I would reject uh but that sounds to me like then you have twice the opportunity to get past those things all right thank you so much thank you so the rest of you I can talk to you outside if you like I have I have lots of time [Music]