Hiring for Hopeless Perfectionists

[Music] all right so I'm gonna get started this is hiring for hopeless perfectionist and if you do the Twitter thing I included those embarrassing feel free to tweet like so if we came to flash-forward yesterday I claimed about the hiring process at TCC is pretty integrals that kind of the kind of games we make and so I wanted to give a talk about how does a small studio create a large impact within the industry so thanks for joining me for hiring for hopeless perfectionist so Who am I my name is Sonny Pavlovich I'm the studio manager at that game company I've been there for three years I've been in the game industry for five years and for a few years prior to that I was in entertainment and I was doing things such as production marketing project management localization hiring all those

sorts of things which tie really neatly into what I do in my current role as to do a manager basically I oversee internal operations and external relationships so when I was hired three years ago believe it or not that game company included a total of three people in 2012 so obviously they had made three games it wasn't like there was only three people making those games but that what happened there is a topic for another talk and has been covered in other entities and such so I'm not going to go into that because I thought the focus for my talk today I'm really going to be talking about how we went from these three people when I started to building a studio of 15 full-time people into part-time people and that is as of March 2015 so in addition to the three leads that were there when I started there are also four other returning

developers from our previous games so what does that game come to be done we've made three games for the PlayStation 3 that first one was Flo in 2007 then we came out with flour in 2009 and our most recent title was journeying 2012 so each of these games are award winning games that have received numerous industry honors including Game of the Year for journey and they've inspired a wide array of eclectic and devoted fan art which you know makes us really happy but really the point of all this is that the games themselves were the result of relentless hopeless perfectionism and I think that's a trait that defines that game company that I want to talk about more today and how we built that studio and because that's what has allowed such a small development team to create the kind of memorable game experiences that people have come to know and associate with our studio so talking about inspirations what are inspirations for this talk and

so the first one is within the industry that game company is kind of might be conserved and anomaly and so people often come to us and ask you know what is the philosophy that allows your studio to make these games like how did you guys do it so this talk hiring for hopeless perfectionist is my way of demystifying that game company's internal process and guiding values I would say my inspiration number two is okay I'm talking about hiring why would I talk about hiring at the Game Developers Conference because in my view hiring is such an integral process to the kind of games we make and the studio were building and for something that touches virtually every aspect of game development it gets so middle of attention so I'm here to throw a spotlight on this critical process and what has worked whenever we're hiring for our studio and what and really my goal for this talk for you guys afterwards is I want to leave you with a newfound appreciation and understanding

for the hiring process and all the work that really goes into it and to doing it well so hopefully it will inspire a reflection and leave you with some ideas to take back with you to your in studio and like discuss further about maybe things that you might want to start doing too so there are many many ways to hire and grow studio that thing coming obviously is just one of them but I think of all the ways are not all ID ideal and for example you have something that kind of looks like this so why is this not ideal it's very efficient and the hires are generic expendable and replaceable so if you're thinking about it from a financial perspective this is probably perfect but if you're thinking about this from a creative perspective this is not what you want it's completely impersonal and it's not very remarkable and it as a result it's not really - very remarkable games so I would say if you took the suppose predicted outcomes would probably be you're not hired and very carefully to build a you know a very

specific team that works well together that has a lot of cohesion and that's going to have a lot of retention the team members knowing that they were hired kind of generically they're not going to have so much personal investment in what they're making and ownership and like that dedication to go the extra mile as a result they don't really care about the quality of the product as much as it could the product itself might be somewhat mediocre obviously this is going to create stress within the studio which is not good for creative people but also the upper level management might induce a lot of crunching which is not fun for the employees and then for all the crunching that may go into a mediocre product it could potentially lead to layoffs anyway so not not ideal so I think there's a better way to hire and this is what I try to do during my time at TTC is very carefully and slowly pick individual peoples for all the skills and experience that they bring and how they complement each other so we have this one the whole cohesive team of very

interesting and wonderful no ok there we go ok that's everyone all right so the point I'm trying to make with this slide is that building a studio is so much more than you're not just filling a place with warm bodies who can do work and I think if that's not your goal then the hiring mentality you take has to reflect that so we have to ask ourselves what is our goal and it's so much more than hey I'm hiring here's an employment offer so what I'm trying to say is hiring is important and even more broadly I would go as far to say is it's a foundational pillar that you should create in your overall strategy as a studio you know really where do you want to take your studio what kind of people do you want to be putting in your studio to what kind of outcomes do you want to have and this

may be obvious but when I talk about hiring I'm really talking about hiring well and hiring well means you put a lot of thought attention and care into this process just like you do when you're making games obviously input is output so hire well and hiring never ends it's an ongoing process again it's not just giving out offers but it's about once these people get into your studio how do you empower them how do you get them to be creative how are they invested in doing their best work how do you get them to retain and spread the word that hey this is a great place to work you know and so on so that they're bringing their like-minded individuals to come join you so there's a saying ABC always be closing I would say always be hiring that's hiring dividend because the ideal goal is to talk about how do we build something like this and how do we avoid building something like this so as a

quick intro those are the underlying principles about hiring at TDC so since this talk is hiring for a hopeless perfectionist let's go back to our hopeless perfectionists so these are our hopeless perfectionist they are the executive team at TTC now and they're our lead developers they were there since the beginning on flow flower and journey so I would say the hopeless perfectionism that pervades our studio really starts with these three what is I hopeless perfectionist obviously I have to define that so I would say there's three qualities first is you devote an immense amount of time and attention to quality and craft and that's pretty much all number one you are a truth seeker you rely on experience and experimentation you don't rely on conventional methods and what other people do you're in an ongoing struggle to reach ever new heights because you're never really satisfied with your your last achievement or accomplishments they're always seeking to do something better they also help us

perfectionist so when we talk about hopeless perfectionism and how our studio is structured and how we said about our goals it's really based on what are our strengths to the studio and what are our weaknesses and how do we always worked on capitalizing on our strengths to compensate for the weaknesses so us hopeless perfectionist who spend way too much time thinking and working on game development the things that we're good at are making games that are artistic that have lots of high powers that can be attractive and accessible to a large group of people that makes up for our weaknesses which typically fall under categories like business development we're not thinking so much and we're not devoting specifically the resources to like well how do we recruit people and kind of our philosophy always falls back to the strengths and really what we enjoy doing is like well if we make an awesome game people will find out about it and

they'll be like hey I want to do that too so we don't really need to spend as much time when we treatment which we don't want to do anyway and things like management and marketing if if you're making a great game people are talking about your deal so this leads me to a key point if there's one thing I've learned about backing company it's that they're an obsessively product focus studio and that's what we live breathe and talk about every single day so full stop on that one so talking about well since we are obsessively product focus studio what does that mean there are two rules the bulk of activity and resources go to development because that's rating product is example when we moved into our new studio back in I think 2013 the previous tenants left a bunch of leftover mugs that they never used and so what did we do we happily open the

box and started using them especially as we hired and had more people on our team and we're like hey mugs because among hormones but because we don't care about spending our resources on buying bugs because you'll still be able to drink a coffee and tea but if you ask like hey I need this new hardware because I want to do this cool thing and you know this this isn't cutting it anymore we're like sure no question we'll buy it so yeah resources go to development it's not that we care about and secondly if it doesn't support the product it doesn't matter and that comes up in so many ways if someone says like hey here's this new initiative or like hey why don't we do more press it's like Walt is not going to help the product no then there's like hey we have 15 people there's no one there to do it we don't want to spend the time with money so a really great example of this and something that I get a lot of flack for sometimes both from like our publicist and other marketing people is hey this is our website guess what it's circa

2006 the year the company started because you know sure there are people in our studio who have web development skills but it's sort of a question of do you want to be making in the game or do you want to be working on the website so you can if you look at our jobs page there's photos from our studio back in 2009 when we're all young and skinny so we're not great at conventional marketing and it shows so when we are hiring though what is it that we're looking for and what is our larger strategy since that's we want to build to our strengths so we're very product focused so when we hire since we started out with hiring or bring together these hopeless perfectionist hopeless perfectionist want to work with other people with similar values and who are aligned in their goals so they won't over with other hopeless perfectionist people who are always seeking that the highest that they can do so you either hire more hopeless perfectionist or you hire

people who work well and support hopeless perfectionist because the truth is and I'm not going to lie hopeless perfectionists are not perfect they are far from perfect they are very imbalanced people they have they're very good at certain things and so they you need other people to create a cohesive whole the point is you have a team that's all aligned working towards the same goal and when you hire creatives order things that they really which gets them to do their best work you want to look for people who who are directly invested and motivated to do their best work because they feel a sense of personal ownership so when you think about like layers of bureaucracy or management it's like we try to remove that as much as possible it's like hey we hired you because we think you're the best at what you do and we trust you I think Trust is so fundamental and I'll talk about this later I might talk about how we have a really extensive hiring process and that's because we want to hire these people who once like the

hiring front like once you've got the offer and you're in the studio it's like go wild we trust you do the best you can and so if these are really talented hard-working people you want to give them direct feedback and which is basically reward for they did a good job they made choices so it's like they can instantly make decisions about hey I think this is a good way to do it let's do it and then they see like oh that's it into the experience I thought okay let me change that and that's what rewards them that's how they're motivated they don't have a manager telling them hey I need you to do these five things by the end of the week so you're self-motivated self manage there's no external bureaucracy and you're accountable to each other and yourself so now I'm going to talk about so how did we actually start building this studio how do we start recruiting and hiring and bringing these people together before there was even a product level where this what's the original story 40g see so I would just let you know like to make a big impact you need to have a

small team and you need these people who have or very talented and very invested in doing these things so the studio co-founder is really found each other even way back then based on product because they're very product focus so as students because the company was started straight out of when everyone started to Steve was in school so they were making games as students they basically just kept running into each other as student game festivals because back then they just spent all their free time making games and doing the best they can and be recognized for it so even though that their network at the time was small and like they had nothing like hey let's hire a recruiter and let's put out as on my search studio it's just you it's very easy to identify other people with similar Drive and dedication talent and this entrepreneurial spirit which is really what it takes to start a small studio so because it's like hey we keep making these student games with running into each other so now it's time to find a studio I guess I want to work with you

because I know I know you and I know you do good work and we can work well together so what does that look like going all the way back to 2005 at GDC at that izf student showcase we had these two games show up among about 10 so back then it's just like there's a student showcase there's no like single winner so we had this game diet in and my attendant made him it was probably none of you have ever heard even if you're like huge fans of that game company so what does that look like this is the diadem team with our TDC audio director Vincent diamante working on that student project if you remember that only did Vincent work on these projects he also joined that game company to do the music composition for flower and it's yeah current audio director and here we have GDC creative director Genova 10 for the no ii game mutton mayhem we have TDC lead engineer at john edwards so 2005 izf student showcase next year rolls around oh

there's another student gaming competition it's called Slamdance guerrilla game maker comfort and many of you may not have heard of this because it lasted about two years but back then that's where the students were going to show the games and so in 2006 there were it was a new set of game so this was cloud which you may be familiar with if you're familiar with backing company and ocular Inc and once again what do we see we have these engineered John Edwards into number ten showing up at this with their respective games okay later in 2006 we're back at GDC okay we're back at GDC for the student showcase once again again winning our cloud and ocular ink so you can see this

trend here there's not that many students making these games but they keep running into each other which brings us fast-forward to 2007 by Novak incoming has already been formed we're working on our first game flow for PlayStation which is just a remake of the student version of flow for PC and this is the founding team of tgc way back when so we have on the Left Kellee Santiago who worked on cloud and we have Nick Clark who worked on flow at USC with Jenova Chen you can see peeking under whose jack is a flow shirt then we have Austin Wintory who also went to USC and worked on flow and many people may be familiar if you joined us again to work on journey to write the music for that next to Austin in the middle of Genova and once again we had John Edwards so these are the this is TDC in its earliest days and again Vincent would come back later

to work on the flower after so so I wanted to ask if anyone's ever paying attention did you notice that uh TCC's lead engineer oops I went too fast my slides oh I know sorry about this okay Judy CV ah yeah did you notice that a DC's lead engineer doesn't have any front-facing photos I think this is a shy guy okay so bonus tip since we're at GDC you know what else happens at GDC if you're driving along Interstate five in California you might get inspired to make an X came in first

a regional IP as a studio so just I thought anyway that was traditional flower if you couldn't tell okay so now we have a studio we have a product or a product focus we have something to talk about so how do we build a studio with that in mind so we're getting the word about hiring and remember that game companies an obsessively product focus - do we really want to just be making games we don't want to be doing anything else but you know what even though we're straight-up terrible at conventional marketing and recruiting we know that brand building does help the product and so just hiring well so when we do have to do kind of like external public facing things it's still about the product so what do we do we give talks this is you know attend at the 2014 games for change keynote and when we give talks it's mostly about our products and our process because that's what we are that's what we know that's

what we feel is worth sharing because honestly hiring is a numbers game and you never know what which one exactly is going to hit with or resume with the person you want to hire but the more brenards reputation we build based on external outreach around our product the higher the chances that we're going to find some good hires because of it so this is reputation building this is how tgc those marketing plus it's good karma to share knowledge with their peers at conferences like GDC as you see you know Chen and Nick Clark because at heart we just want to make great products giving talks as a byproduct and conduit to making great games so we make time for us even when we would rather be designing or rather be coding okay so if we're doing our jobs well which hopefully we are and creating these memorable game experiences the press is going to be more motivated and likely to reach out and build stories around our studio which really cuts out

the need for us to go out and like kind of show and be like hey notice us like they already think hey these are some people doing something special this is worth talking about let's let's do a story saving more resources back for development so what I'm saying is yeah external research external outreach always comes back to the product so that's how we get the word out so no how do we actually go about hiring these people what is our process like you know the nitty gritty it looks something like this first I want to mention where do our eventual hires come from so I would say the number three is from our via application on our website so we do hire on there but it's in third place second place would be speaking and actually doing things like what I'm doing now puts me and the rest of the team in touch with people who are like hey I did what you do I think I'm qualified let's talk and then the number one is personal

recommendation so those are that's when so and we trust and they're within the industries like hey you know if there's a promising student or hey I know someone who's looking at speech their job you really should talk to them and I just want to be clear that even though personal recommendations is a number one way we've had most of our hires it's not to say like a personal recommendation is look I guarantee like hey we're gonna hire you it just means that these people are familiar with what we're looking for and what we need and so it tends to have higher yield didn't say job application we're just anyone is applying but we still hired from there okay so this is what our job application form looks like it's pretty simple straightforward it's a Google Form it's not fancy it probably started when we built our website and so like that serviced us and it works not exciting how about cover letters so I think cover letters within our studio is a bit like I would say it's slightly controversial

maybe that's not the right word but in the sunset like I'm like comfort letters because when I read them I get a sense of a person's personality and if you think about what a cover letter is it's really just like how to get notice and make yourself stand out but other you know it doesn't work or it works against some people if you require a cover letter so we don't and the reason is if English is not your native language then maybe not gonna write a great cover letter and for games that don't really future language we don't really care if you have great English and secondly if you're a creative person and you aren't the best at writing but you're afraid aren't your creative programming why would you be motivated to spend time to write a cover letter when you should just like create something awesome which is why I actually selected this image so this image is fan art and it comes from someone we eventually hired as a artists intern for one summer and she never originally expressed interest in working for us and she was never considering game development so what happened is even though as someone who actually

didn't really play any games I think journey might have been the second game she ever played but she fell had in over heels for and she loved the art style she gravitated towards it so she kept tweeting at us like hey that game company like here's some art I did and eventually I would call that that's a non-traditional cover letter because she was doing her part to express an interest and an alignment in the company and so I reached out to her and was like hey maybe you should consider working for us and she did for the summer eventually what happened though is she's now working at Disney and I think this is actually a salient point because it's something that the game energy can learn about at least when it comes to the products we make and how we hire when I was trying to hire a concept artist role I was working really hard to see about trying to diversify the applicant pool and so I was looking like I took the initiative to seek out a lot of female artists and I was checking like dozens

and dozens and dozens of portfolios and what I was finding a lot of the best talent and these again these were not people who were applying I was just saying who does great concept art work a lot of these people were at Disney and a lot of them tended to be female and I was thinking how can you don't see these people and the industry and greater numbers why are they all at Disney and if you think about it kind of makes sense one Disney is a company that's known for being very family-friendly and like employee focus and having great benefits and so they encourage like a nice work-life balance but also if you think about as a kid everyone watch Disney films and everyone kind of fell in love with that so when you get older and you're going through school and you're graduating you're looking for a job or are you going to work when I worked at places that make awesome stuff and guess what games don't traditionally appeal to women and very high numbers so I think in a very very tangential way how that game company hires is by making those products that appeals to more people

that will hopefully then help diversify the people who are working for us and so that's one thing we can learn from film and animation they know how to create experiences that speak to a lot of people so just a side note there okay so now we're gonna talk about resumes so resumes do some things really well I'll just say that like the first you know at a quick glance you can master the candidates focus priorities baseline skills past work environments for example have they been working in small Cu environments or are they coming from mega studios and you know that really doesn't matter when you think about who can be the most effective in a small studio but I think resumes have also a lot of downsides they don't indicate talent you can't tell what their values are you don't know where their taste is so if resumes have very limiting information so this is an example of a resume I got and obviously I normalized it but I wanted to show you why this resume was

particularly terrible um I don't like resumes there's like so little white space maybe this doesn't come across very clearly but for example they really packed in all the text that they could there was so little space between the lines they chose like the tiniest whatever like a point like eight or nine point and you know what it was three pages long it's three pages of this and so what does that tell me right off the bat you don't know what you want you don't really want to work here you haven't focus I'm telling me like this is what I can give you you're just like here's the things I've been doing for the past ten years and unfortunately the front was so small I literally couldn't read it and I'm just like sorry I this person was not under consideration anymore so I don't love resumes but I love portfolios because at a quick glance I know it kennedy's focus i know their priorities i know their baseline skills i know their past work environments so here's

an example of a application that i thought was awesome and we went on to hire this person and i'm very happy oh I should note we went on to hire this person and because they had such an awesome application in portfolio this is an example of someone who did a five IRA website they didn't know anyone at the studio they didn't know anyone that we knew they just applied or were like here's what I can do and I wanted to anonymize it so I did some photoshop work just a respect privacy like here's why I love it portfolio BAM I click on it I can see what they did here very concisely they're like here's Who I am here's what I've done here's how to contact me further and really nice visual layout of hey find out more about me click these links and so I'm actually going to show you a small snippet of what what they what their demo reels look like and I want to mention that this is someone who came straight out of school and I I

appreciated they were able to I can see that they had worked on 3d game environments and they've worked in small teams and they had a very interesting approach to game design and aesthetic and that instantly caught my eye I was like there's not that many students coming out of school these days with this kind of so I can see yeah like they're making these very interesting choices and creating this world and atmosphere and it shows like they know they even have a wide range and they just have a baseline talent that was exciting so yes successful higher curly in our studio so you've said admitted a resume or an application or your portfolio and I'm like hey this is cool let's talk more so interview screens are pretty standard within the industry so I like to think that you know there's several key functions that take place whenever you do an interview screen number one is

inform so let's say I'm talking on the phone with the candidate it was like okay well here's the role we're hiring for for example let's say we're hard to feel engineer so as a field engineer and you know also what's the structure of the studio where the values of the team it's like okay we're a small team everyone knows each other it's very transparent you have access to anyone you want like if you if you want to go talk to an artist when I go talk to a composer they're sitting right next to you Jam out ideas like totally you can do what you want and because of that if you have a lot of motivation you'll you'll like working here if you like working on small team sizes I don't have you know like I said a lot of management over like washing over you so our process is hey we do a lot of iteration we fail a lot but I think it's exciting as you get to try out ideas and you put them actually in the game like you're constantly working on stuff it doesn't work that's okay you throw it away but

it's up to you what to using as fast in the game do it so I talked about the roll and I talked about what how do we work in the studio how do we want work together how do we communicate together and then I try to sell them and a lot of times after I've had like towards the end of the phone call like do you have any questions and they'll say what do you like about your job from what well let me tell you and I started really excited because it was like I work with these like awesome people they're so smart and all my previous jobs like I would be the one was putting in the extra hours and like pushing it like hey we can do this better and you know like that's not good enough let's spend more time and this is the first time I've been in a company where it's like oh I'm pushing hard to keep up with everyone else as opposed to like oh I'm trying to pull everyone along with me so I get really excited about that and I'm like I'm working with these people who are super passionate and they have all this integrity to create this really pure for the player

experience and they're so smart and I'm sitting in these design meetings and it's like it's totally it's not structured so we came in with a goal we're just like okay we're gonna have a design meeting let's sit down we're not we don't have a design document it's just like hey I'm just gonna throw out some ideas and they start like sketching on a whiteboard and it's like oh my gosh it's so amazing oh my gosh I totally would work I'm so excited for this game even though it's just like sketches on a whiteboard like oh I can see it and so I get to be in this environment every day and it's it's it's great and I got to do what I want like I yeah I get to decide you know what today I want to focus on this and that's what I think is best for the studio and that's what I'm gonna do so you know there's there's a certain amount of selling that has to happen if like the studio is awesome but it's also about finding the right fit this kind of environment is not for everyone and you know there are times where I have to turn people away even though they're like oh I really want to work at that game company I really respect what you do and you know they have honestly got

like a solid background and like they're skilled but I have to turn them away because I don't think that they would fit I don't think they would actually enjoy working here because working in this kind of environment we were just doing these prototypes is actually really stressful and as much as it's great to have all this freedom of hey I want to work on this thing I think this is what the game needs if you have that for like two plus years where no one is telling you this is what the game is it's like no you go make the game you go tell me what the game is a lot of people can't handle that environment they need the kind of feedback they need the structure and they need someone saying yeah I need you to do these five things by the end of the week or you know maybe they're just not really good at indicating something like that so what I do is I say hey you're gonna be working really hard but if you're really passionate about it and you really like that you're gonna have a phenomenal time but if you need a lot of structure you're going to just like spaz out and like you're you're not gonna you're not

gonna want to stay here anymore so there's an element of selling as well scary and then obviously I'm evaluating people I like I listen to you know what are their values and filter that hey they're great okay let's hopefully move forward to the next step so I'm gonna talk about tests and I know that this has been a bit of a point of contention within the industry of like well why is this necessary why do people wedding candidates get subjected to this process and and so like I can see both sides of it and so I definitely take this into consideration I don't think it's cool to ask people to do free work for you especially for any like extended amount of time like that's not what it has is it's not to like steal people's IP and put it into your game because they're too cheap to pay them and that's know what to put them through an endurance test you don't give them like a month-long assignment a test is and I think specifically at that game company why why is this step so crucial why can we not skip this is because what we do

is so different and on the way we work and the skills we need is like it's such a specific combination that just because you said like hey whatever working in the industry you know x2 do for five years and you know been in these roles it's like yeah but you know did you have like 15 other people on your specific team just to do you know AI or were like you doing the AI do you know how to talk to artists do you know how to both implement and like design and and brainstorm so we do this to go like I want to know that if you come to the studio you actually have these baselines one the skills but two is taste because sometimes people are they're awesome at what they do and they're really good at enabling other people but so much of what about game commenting experiences is seeped in like this emotion and artistry is like well there's only a handful of people to do any one task anyway it's like you kind of have to be able to do it and make it look and feel really good so that's what it test is

for so I'm going to talk about a field engineer test and I kind of talked a little bit of water feelings in your towns a feel engineer another way to put it is like they're a hybrid kind of designer engineer because we don't have any just solo designers at that game company if you work as I think honey you have to be able to implement basically any idea you have because hey there's only so many people so if you think about what user experience is and usually the title is like oh we're having a user experience designer it's like well at that can come in we flip it with all your hiring a user experience engineer so basically you have all the sensibilities of what is going to be the optimal user experience but I also have the engineering heavy background that I can go and implement that so a fun factoid about backing company which most people are surprised when they find out about is that the majority of the TDCJ

team is actually engineers because we need the people who can build all the systems so again what does it feel engineer that they the other ones who's putting together it's like well how they're making the decisions implementing how's the character going to move what are the baseline interactions or the system what how does the AI work how does the camera work so you're creating all these like moment to moment decisions that creates a larger feeling of being in this world and it's like you know color choices what do what's in the environment what is the audio sound like what is the pacing and how the characters interrelate with each other I'm going to show you this this is a test submitted successfully my son when we we're not to hire and sitting right here so the background for this we the prompt was create an experience where it's like you are you taking the player back to the experiences being a child and like

you're kind of tapping into childhood nostalgia and it was very open-ended so we part of the test is also to see how are you gonna interpret this what are your creative like skill sets like in decision-making skills so in this experience we have this one central character who is what we call like a childlike figure and they're out kind of in this world and they're with a parent like figure and then this other fun little figure comes along and so the the player figures kind of has to decide well do I kind of want to go explore and experiment with this fun new character or do I want to stick with my character so when I play I just have pay attention to like though there's really detailed choices made of like how does a character how smooth is it huh what does it feel yeah what is the feeling you're getting from this field engineer test [Music]

so that's actually just a recording of me playing through really quickly this the initial part of the experience so yeah we hired that we thought this was a great test they made really good choices did they successfully conveyed the feeling of being a child and it felt good so higher next up we have a concept artist test so really quickly this is basically a color script so within like one single image can you portray a simple story art and like tell us what

color choices you would use to convey the mood and so this is also someone who went on to hire I really like this other image that they did so within a single shot can you produce an image that invokes evokes an emotion or feeling or suggests a narrative and I feel like hey this is this is a it's gonna capture you so we went on to hire this artist and we are very happy with his contributions okay so that's the testing process that's it forever right actually we try to again to be humane about it we try and really hone in on let's say this is a data for you don't want you to do too much more than that maybe include some brainstorming time or polishing time but we really want to know what your baseline skills are like you could just pump out in a day and the thing is as much time as it takes for a candidate to do a test we put so much thought into how do we tailor this task to give us exactly the right data that fits the role that we're trying to hire for and and tests are interesting because

although it's work that we ask a candidate to do we also it's always about hiring and selling you want to use a test as a barometer to say these are this is what we care about and these are the kind of things you're actually going to be working on it so if you enjoyed this test and you thought it like to challenge you in all the right ways and you wouldn't do this every day then you will like working at thanking company so ok we get to the testing process hopefully it is successful and we move on to the next stage and that is the all-day group interview with these people and so obviously this is a huge time investment from our side as well as the candidates but the thing is not that many candidates got to this stage because this is basically the final stage where you spend a day with us and you talk to us you have lunch with us we show you the game you sit in on meetings we you get to meet every single person

on the team so that if you finally do join us it's like you know exactly well you have a good idea of exactly what you'll be doing with who and how and how do we operate what are our values how does a typical day at that game company look like and yeah it is a lot of investment to think well you take like one day out of downtown from development and that's because we could consider hiring so important that's such a huge investment that we're really trying to hire for the long term looks like we're taking you into our team so we one want to make sure that we can work with you we can communicate well and there's like a good vibe right between us but it's also hey you're evaluating us too so if you're going to be devoting yourself to working at this company for several years don't you want to know who you're working with so yeah you're gonna meet every single person and that's the point of an all-day interview and it's also really important we we will fly people in to spend the day with us all right so

hiring doesn't always work out and sometimes you have to reject people that's a natural parse part of the hiring process but we have to remember that these are people where we are dealing with and especially like I'm usually like the main contact for dealing with this person and if they've gone through all these different stages and if they've invested so much time than like doing tasks and doing interviews it's like they they deserve a lot of respect and and part of it is yeah because that's another person I'm communicating with and it's no an anonymous person is someone I'm very carefully like trying to filter it to bring into the studio so I must have liked them on some level but also well it's good to be nice right but these are people who are going to go on and tell other people about your studio and what their process is like as people like to talk and you know what if they were like they had some things that were really good Finn you thought they were really smart but for some reason they just didn't fit the role and if you've if you

know if I've done my job well and I've left a really strong impression on them maybe you know they know people in the industry they might actually recommend people back to apply it that studio and so if you have this like long term big-picture thinking doing always putting care and thought and attention to this process even when you have to reject someone can really work you know in the studio's favorite and so it's important to be respectful so an example of this is there were a number of times where I was evaluating some junior highers maybe fresh out of school for a programming position and so I felt really bad I was like oh I really likes you and I think you had the right motivation and you know you seem great you just don't have the baseline experience and I felt bad of like I've just got like reject you and tell you to go work somewhere else so one thing I did was I passed her the other programmers of life come on just give me like a chichi like what do you want to see like just lay it out like this is not something we advertise on our website but this is something that I put together and I literally I've said this

on multiple occasions I'm like hey you know what if you work here you need to be able to do these things but even if you don't work here this is gonna help you in the industry when you go work in another studio so my recommendation to you is like hey take some time make sure you know all these things and that'd be good and I think that's just a way of they've given me their time I I want I don't want to leave them empty handed and like sorry I can't hurt you so I mean these little things you do but hopefully everything works out and you you know offers accepted so as I said the hiring never ends because you want to make sure people know that hey I really care about you and I want our teen and I want everything to work out so you know people it's this whole messy process and even if you've done this complete hiring process once they get into the studio you have to devote a lot of attention and onboarding them and making sure they do really know how things are done they knew they know who to talk to to ask questions they feel like someone's invested in their success

there's you a lot of times new hires like we work really close with them definitely the first few days you know sometimes the first few weeks sometimes months just to make sure it's like they're getting on that right path so it's like because as I said what we do is really stressful so if they're coming in they feel like geez I'm making all these prototypes and they keep nothing's sticking nothing is getting in the game and they make sure that they feel like failure is a success because it meant you're trying something and you define that that thing doesn't work and it's not that nor none of your self skating in the game because most of I mean if it takes us this many years to make a game and it's not a huge game most of the stuff we're making is not getting to the game so onboarding is really important because it feels really good if you're a new hire and on your first day you're already submitting stuff into the game I mean that's just feels good I would say like a second part that I personally think is really important is that when we hire someone and they have a partner that that partner feels like they're excited about their partner's a new

opportunity and they feel welcomed by the team and they get to know like hey here's the people that my partner is gonna be working with so it's like it's just extending of like hey when you make an offer to someone it's like you're taking the whole package and it's like okay they have they have people in their lives get them invested in being really excited and being supportive of the work that they do because sometimes they're just going to be hard and you want them you want everyone on that same side of like hey you're really excited about this job it's a tough day it's okay you can do it come back again and you know if you're gonna have like social events make sure those partners are invited so we're getting kind of close to the end so just wrapping up like if I've done my job well the hiring process builds retention and prevents talent poaching this I think is really important also because if I've invested all this time awesome people into my studio I want to make sure that they're happy and if they're happy and someone else comes along I'm gonna throw all this money at them they're gonna be like you know what what I got is really good so it's a it's a it's a whole process and it matters

and the idea is I'm creating dedicated teams that work well together so really wrapping up what's it like working with a studio of hopeless perfectionist and why do we do it in a few slides working with hopeless perfectionist is super frustrating why because when you've been working on a thing for a really long time and you know you haven't talked about the game and it hasn't been polished and we extended the deadline again it's a lot easier to just kind of be tempted to say you know it's good enough let's like let's ship it let's keep going and then just enjoy getting back with your colleagues rather than like really pushing and fighting for these unproven ideas and impossible ideals but that would be a lot less meaningful and that's not why we do it because we're hopeless perfectionist so it's gonna be frustrating sometimes but that's for the process I think working at the studio and being a hopeless perfectionist is also very motivating

because you're getting these constant new challenges and you're creating these new discoveries that keeps us ever pushing towards something greater and that really actually leaves you hungry to go find the next goal on your next set of accomplishments and see how far you can go working at that game Kony is inspiring because we make experiences where players feel something they've never felt before and sometimes it's because it's the first game they've played and they've actually decided hey that looks interesting or maybe they've had a lifetime of playing games and they're like I've never felt out in the game before and when you see this happen over and over again with all new players you realize I'm making something that makes a difference to people in this industry hard for helpless perfectionists the studio the work is challenging because we're redefining new boundaries of a worthwhile interactive experience and that can be really overwhelming when you don't have these baseline models to work off of but on the other hand it

also means we get to redefine new boundaries of interactive experience so you know that was short working at that game company it can be funny and empowering when we're at comfortable expressing ourselves as individuals together and yes that's an actual picture from our studio working on Becky honey is worth it because it's really hard but in the end via to make wonderful game experiences that we're proud of that are different than that we wish to see more and in the end it's because we're building cohesive teams to break through hard times and make something great this is that game company thanks QA [Music]

so I'm very open and welcome to the QA I think we have like three minutes so if anyone is interested we don't have time to like fit you in I will be in the room across the hall it's room 200 - you're welcome to join me there and sprinkle throughout this room are my colleagues so you can go harass them as well in the house the laws of quick yep but our here and here and here so yes I'm just curious have you had any experiences where you've made a mistake and hiring there where something just hasn't quite worked out and how you've dealt with it or would recommend dealing with that yes actually so in the three years that I've oh sorry I'd need to repeat the question you asked me a really lengthy question I don't know if other people have time so please stick around the question is have I ever had an experience where I hired

someone and it didn't work out and what hat or what would I recommend that's really tricky so it's happened three times in the three years that I've been there which is like an OK rate it's not great um what I found out sometimes when that happened when we hired someone in it didn't work out it was because we actually subverted the process that I talked about here so there's a reason why we have a process and we go through these steps it's because we're really trying to do a thorough an assessment before you know making that huge commitment which really is it feels really bad when you put in all this effort to bring someone to the team and then oh it didn't work out like that emotionally it feels bad so I would say follow the process don't skip don't think like oh I know better all their work are out there flying oh they're they've had enough experience we don't have to do that stuff or they come highly recommended sick you still have to do the stuff and I think the other thing I would advise is if you know someone is not working out you want to identify that sooner rather than later

and really you want to leave have the person leave on amicable terms so when it doesn't work out it's not always like oh we're rejecting that person sometimes that person's like you know I'm not really getting what I'm looking for from the studio so you what I advise is if someone feels like they're ready to leave or if we feel like maybe it's better for everyone if this person needs is you make it safe for them to leave so you don't you're not there to like villainize them you want to go like hey if you feel like you can do your best work somewhere else we're gonna support you like do you need you know references you need recommendations you need to talk to people we'll help you because we still like you we want you to do well and you don't want to have like bad feelings so or also sometimes it's like making sure that you give them some kind of compensation of like okay if you're gonna be out of work for a while yeah here's some severance oh it's just it makes it safe so it's like they're not gonna feel like oh I'm alone on this boat hi I was wondering roughly what

your success rate is based on number of applicants who apply for a position and the number that you would actually give an offer to roughly okay so to break it down into numbers so like I said when I started there was three people so I would be fourth we're about 15 people right now so I'm only going to be speaking to the duration of time when I was there in these three years so what that's like seven people and then we moved to 15 obviously some people laughed so there was a few more hires so we made eight hires that worked previous developers on previous games or the people who are there or myself so eight hires I've seen thousands of applications so I guess that's also why I kind of highlight those things of like

working an awesome portfolio make yourself said no they don't have a three page long resume that says everything that I can't read come talk to us at talks and so it's just I mean we're people if you seem cool we will talk to you we don't get to respond to everyone but as I said there are people we hire who just straight up apply thank you oh I didn't say the question what is our rate of hiring based on the number of hi Irene thank you um Susan Macklin punch beam music can you speak about contracting versus hiring and how you might adapt these tips to finding a contractor with the eventual goal of you know ideally hiring for a permanent team okay so the question is how do we deal with hires full-time hires versus contractors and kind of how do we deal with that and what the differences and I would say at

that game company we strongly prefer hiring full-time hires because the idea is we've already gone through this an extensive review process it's like we either want you or we don't and this idea of like kind of either a part-time or extended trial hasn't really worked out in our favor very well and the thing is like if we're not sure we want you again we're very feely people so like once you're in that studio with us we are like going to latch onto you and so it's kind of like once you're in you're in and then like if you're in but then you're not quite the fit we want like then that's just kind of bad because then it's like oh we have to fire that person but we really like that and they're cool so we really try and just focus on the full time so they they can get up there our full-time hire they get our full attention and all that comes with being part of that we do have some contractors but those are for non-development roles and things that can be a little bit more tangential such as our current community manager is part-time although I am hiring a lead

community manager to be full-time in ours to you because I think community management really important I'm just gonna say that right now and our publicist she works with us a part-time she's I think also a special exception because she really gets us and I think that's another thing with contractors like if their mind is elsewhere or spread out they are not going to necessarily be the best fit and making good choices so you really need people like in the team sweating it out with you day in day out and know like what's best because again it's really hard to define the knees it's like but if you're there every day you see what's going on you can better make choices that help the studio so I hope that answers your question okay it looks like we're out of time I'll be in 202 across the hall if you want to follow up with any of us here there's a bunch of us please fill out your session evaluations and thank you enjoy the rest of GC [Applause]