How to Run Your Own Career Fair on a Tiny Budget

[Music] welcome everyone we'd like to get started on our talk today this is our how to run your own career fair on a tiny budget we are the IG da Los Angeles chapter for context here of course IG day is a non profit we know we're coming from a big city but our focus here today isn't just telling you about what we did in LA its trying to figure out how we can adapt this so it can work for more places we'd like to help you run a career for whether it's at your college whether it's at your local I'd read a chapter or maybe you run your own meetups jams other kinds of events we'd like you to be able to add this to your repertoire of things you can do to serve your community and so we're possible try to acknowledge some differences of LA compared to some other spaces the one of the note is that the context we were inspired to do this by was the mass layoffs about a year year and a half ago in Los Angeles and so that colored a few of our decisions what kind of mention where that's relevant in a few places at our high level you can see here our agenda we're gonna talk about we're gonna introduce ourselves we're going to kind of give an overview of the event we'll talk about some of the challenges

or constraints that came from our our venue and other factors our time frame talk about what worked what didn't major challenges feedback in this course we're hoping we have this is a live discussion of GDC we'll find some way to receive your inputs and share your stories some discussion questions like to talk about as a group and closing remarks and the here's we can find our chapter online we are on all of the media's you can find us on Facebook Twitter YouTube twitch and LinkedIn let's introduce ourselves I'm the chair of itla this year I'm Chris DeLeon I'm the founder of home team game dev a worldwide group where people build games together for practice if they have questions they work with me or one of my trainers for help outside of that I'm also our alumni chair for indicate and I'm David Malek I'm secretary on the LA chapter and currently I am I'm a jet professor of game design at the Art Center College of Design and I'm also director of development at C design and I'm drew Ridge I run a small work for hiring insulting shop that's focused on online games called game breaking studios

my name is Tiffany Otto I work full-time with IndieCade and I'm a gdal A's Treasurer I work from the business side of things not the development side of things our event was a career fair we have video will share for it the kind of a little highlight walkthrough just so you can see and visualize we're talking about or the rest of the talk will switch that video we're here at industrious Century City where we'll be hosting our recruiting event today first we're gonna check in here with our lovely drew and our volunteer quasar coming through over here on our left we're gonna have a lovely snack assortment and spatial and Walmart's experimental virtual reality unit as you can see we have areas where our members can hang out chat and see if they want to start something together moving down this way we can see that we have individual tables for recruiters to sit at and see if there's candidates that match up with them to our left we have the indie matching area also known as the indie jumble room where candidates who have an interest in indie games or creating a new property can see where their skills can interact we have

representatives from WB games occupier games and sir bo is down this hallway you'll see that we have a ton of lines and that's actually because we had a really long wait list for this event and if you follow me back this way we can head over to the other side of the beautiful industrious space industrious is an amazing co-working space at tends to skew a little older and a little more diverse which matches up with our pillars of inclusivity and diversity for i GT a corporate we have a lovely backdrop for taking photos later and if you follow us through the elevator Bank we'll get to the main conference rooms where recruiters who brought three or more representatives have been assigned spaces these two tables are listed as conversation nooks for some of our more indie Studios we have Fox next games in this room as well as network in this one in addition we have TBA games Inc and this is our war room for IgD a la where our board members can hang out and you know sort of handle everything this room

is a soundproof foam room where Java from DeWitt Street accounting is giving one-on-one personal accounting consultations in addition we have other conference rooms and conversation nooks where bigger studios such as PlayStation and respawn can have a more casual situation so that's basically what we've done with the industrial space and we're hoping we can continue this partnership with them because a several locations in LA area and they're all in these yeah so I was the events chair at the time that we started this event planned it and executed it which means I was the point person so when you're making your own event you'd have a point person let's start with that but what I learned in that process was there's a lot of requirements as dictated by the event and every event space you find will have these kind of constraints they might not look identical to ours but they are going to be there for example we could not come in early to prepare this was okay for us because we didn't need too

much setup but as you'll see later in our challenges there actually we're a couple issues that came from not being able to come in too early I is the chair visited twice and I had a 20 chain email before I actually had 20 email chain before I actually got a signed contract out of it and the paperwork was extensive because we did have HQ involved and by that I mean IG da HQ because we're an international organization so industrious thought 10 minutes to speak to the attendees ahead of time we gave them a mic in a shared space when we had the first 50 or 60 people in and it's a pretty standard thank you for hosting the event it's a chance to advertise so we got our event for free but free is free and what that means is we had to have several agreements with them such as a credit agreement and a social media agreement often your space if they're donating it regardless of your nonprofit status they'll want their collateral in the major space industrial signage had to be prominent in all of our marketing materials as well as like things such as

nametags signage and when we put the video together later we had to show their logo quite a bit in addition industrious offered five days of free co-working on a postcard and everyone was going to receive that in their gift at the end they did end up distributing that via email later we ended up not printing out the collateral because it just didn't have time there was enough bandwidth on our team at that time but physical stuff is important digital stuff is hard to redeem no one actually redeems the digital goods we highly recommend physical envelopes that people can take home later gifts help our partners the people that partner with you whether you get a big sponsor such as Amazon or if you get a local sponsor such as a catering place having them put small gift certificates as a form of PR and marketing so you can add value to your non paying sponsors and get them to give you in kind donations even without a 501 C 3 or 501 C 6 space

so for example a job of the accountant who runs to wit Street LLC he does the accounting consultations I I hate to say this phrase but exposure was his main value ad there he actually ended up getting multiple people calling him from that event he used specialty business cards that were printed in a different style so that when he asked people how they heard of him they actually referenced our event he got paying work out of it and to quote him that paid for me getting the cards printed and coming to the event talk to your sponsors and your partners about what their goals and values are because that'll help you craft something that's necessary for them as opposed to you part of like why a co-working space was such a great fit as to appeal is that IgD a necessarily is bringing in a bunch of people many of whom are freelance people who do development and might use a co-working space new companies getting started who might use that as a stepping stone towards an office and very much that we could potentially say hey we're gonna bring you dozens of people who

will get to know your space your parking your environment your location the city helped make that a value add to them to offer the space for free it was a good match and if you want to make it even more polished and professional one thing we actually did is on our entry survey when people signed up to attend the career fair there's a yes/no question I'm interested in hearing more about co-working and everyone who clicked YES on that we curated into a list and gave to industrious as part of our agreement will talk more about privacy agreements later but everyone knew exactly what they were signing up for when they check that box that was a real value add for industrious cuz for them it was warm leads of people who already were interested in co-working a customized value add this is how you look more professional even if you can't pay for things going on to the vanu budget when I co-workers will talk about that I think the general theme here is working with the venue there's a lot of different things that we did to try and make sure that we were meeting their needs meeting our attendees needs so some of the constraints that I think we mentioned

some of them already they wanted to make sure that we didn't have too many people in this space there obviously for venues like that especially in LA they can get a lot of money to have an event of a certain size so there's a bunch of different things that we had to consider and ended up needing to cap amount of people that we let in things like that and we ended up with a waitlist there are a lot of other options that we could have taken here though that I definitely would think about next time about rolling people in over time could we potentially have two different start times for different groups of people so that we can't keep the event to have under fire code and all these things just different ways to kind of work with it within different strands like that a great framing exercise to use is this is a free career fair all you have to pay is it's one email that you're gonna get from our venue is that okay with you and I think nobody likes to get spam but if you look about the the cost value trade-off there of one email versus getting to you know have a career opportunity that feels pretty strong to people and then there's a number other

constraints in there as well like the timing and like at what time could we be in the venue and for how long all these things you know we we just kind of looked at in trying to do our best with LA traffic how do we start the event you late enough but not too late so that there's still staff on site at the at the venue and things like that feeling that traffic's pattern thing a theme to keep in mind right is especially for a game industry career fair a lot of people are going to gaming career fairs it's not that they don't have a job it's that they're trying to shift into a game industry job and so because of that it's not like oh I can do it the middle of the day their time is necessary flexible we were trying to account for enough time they could get out of their work they could get home they could change into their nice clothes get their business cards still make it out and one of our concerns were always and look out for oh I don't want you're going to skew too late at the same time if you do it too close to than the work day people look at that say I would miss the whole first 45 minutes or I would only get the tail end of it I'm just gonna skip it and so those kind of logistics were part of our factoring in there along side of course the venues constraints of when we could be allowed in as the treasurer one thing I don't know if we've made clear yet is

we ran us off an impact grant from headquarters IG da HQ has a program if you're doing something that positively impacts the local gamedev community and they have a list on their website that's very clear it's very simple we have to positively impact the community with this money and that's how we got the money to run this this was not a free event to run a lot of people told us well it should be easy to run a free event get people to donate stuff you'd be surprised at how difficult that was we did have to take on exterior funding it can still be a low budget but a no budget it seems unlikely to really for that matter meet people's needs of pulling off a professional seeming event some things that did work great for us it's really curious to David your takes on the ways that you were Aliya or connection to a lot of the studios who showed up in terms of the people you reached out to how they're able to make it can you speak a bit to that process what those communications were like one thing that that's really helpful is to have a lot of connections in the game industry even before anything about

thinking about running a game fair just for you personally it helps to us to know as many people as possible and one thing that I've always done is try to to make contact with all the recruiters in the game industry while the executive recruiters that work independently as well as with all the all the recruiters that work on each of the different studios so when we we start I'm out having a job there what I did was go through all my contacts that had already that had already made long ago and gone to each of them to find out if they were interested in participating so that that's her preparation that I had done just in case I never come a time where I was employed I already had people reach out to that gave me preparation for this career fair being able to reach out to people that we can invite to be to to to appear and and and be vendors and are getting career to help out other people

yeah well when I started contacting them a few weeks ahead ahead of the event and one thing that I discovered that that would have worked better is if we had established a date even sooner as different venues we looked at became available and then it turns out we can use that venue and another available the day kept so that that made it hard to arrange our recruiters to come in and Studios to come in we were able to give like four weeks notice most of you I talked to where we're actually very interested in showing up I think recruiters do like having uh like having opportunities to go and meet people because that's really what they're in the business were to go to find out possible people to to join their companies so they they do look forward to having events like this a couple things I think we maybe didn't even organize till after was realizing each of us on in the IG DLA board have different connections industry and we kind of built out a spreadsheet of who

knows people in which places in the area it even that's become a useful resource to us for future kind of things to realize okay well we need some people who are VR in the area or triple-a or Indy or otherwise in the area kind of realizing just how useful it is and that's thing where if some people who are watching this talk are like well I don't have those connections this sounds like an easy cop-out for I geez people to say go to your IG da events there are chapters all over the place and there's necessarily a congregation people who have different connections they Venn diagram a which might surprise you of just how many different places someone can find somebody who again these recruiters when you can invite this these kind of events it's doing their companies a favor in terms of they want to find people who are looking for work or a good match for them and you're helping make that match happen hopefully we're making connections is LinkedIn you can go in on LinkedIn and find the RIA B&S recruiters working at just about every given studio and I've not met one recruiter online that wasn't more than willing to accept my LinkedIn connection so that's part of how I build up my own network yeah their job is almost

accepting anything connection 7 which is actually so building off of what David said we did have a bit of a chicken and egg problem people and companies both only wanted to show up if there were people they expected to have a positive impact or that they wanted to impress on the thing so what we were like hey studio name do you want to be at our Career Fair like well how many made great engineers you have and I'm like I can get back to you with that and then when we started advertising the Career Fair we didn't really hit the high end of that curve of signups until we started putting known entities and like names people it heard of whether that was a local you know local Indies but everyone had heard of or Triple A Studios on the list as soon as we drop to triple-a names on the list brother like our Eventbrite just got loaded out so that's a chicken-and-egg problem and this is where we say like collab with a local IG da chapter if I can speak to there's other point in there too and maybe it sounds obvious and said out loud it's basically if you have some friends some

places that you're more connected to that you can ask first and get some yeses first it's very tough to get people to be the first person to a party if you have a little bit of traction if we have three other students who've said yes we have four the students have said yes it's that much easier for someone to see like oh this is a legitimate thing people will be there it's happening so it's before you approach the strangers who just you only met a LinkedIn yet it's useful to first try to leverage where you can from your in person's connections through however you're finding them yeah and David made a really good point about being able to parse the data of early attendees to invite companies of different sizes if you realize you're getting like a bunch of mid-level audio guys responding then you start targeting your studios appropriately we're very fortunate we're not you know LA New York any of the Nordics you can grab your local industry so you'll be surprised who you can pull in depending on where you are and I will speak to I think some folks probably who are in these areas notice I grew up so I grew up on the Midwest and one of things that happens out there is that the few meetups and events in cities and hubs

that would hold events people would drive from three hours in every direction to be at that thing to find the other people who are in the region now granted they might also be driving three hours of LA traffic but it's no side LA but it's like just because you're not in where there's a major city hub you might surprise yourself on the people who will fly out to your thing etcetera to make it happen like all the things that we've talking about at this point are just like what are the value-adds four different groups right we're we don't have a lot of money to bring to the table to just pay people for this so what's what's in it for the venue what's in it for the attendees what's in it for the you know the candidates the recruiters so those three sides of it and and a lot of this stuff is around yeah so the we know that our recruiters are looking for candidates one of the ways we can answer some of those questions even from our early signups is making sure that whatever sign-up sheet we have we're collecting as much information as we can long as it feels relevant to people so we did go ahead and put in as much information as we could about like please tell us what sort of job you're looking for what you know what what do you consider yourself what how many years have you been in the industry so

we can start to answer these questions when we ask a triple-a studio hey would you like to come to our event and they ask well how many you know mid-level artists you have or higher and we're like okay we have you know five artists on our signup sheet already and we expect it to grow as we put more studios on there this is kind of always a thing when you're talking to any kind of other organization but like if you can start the conversation asking them what it is that they're looking for before you start asking them for things there gives you lots of opportunity to be like okay well we want this and I think we can give you X Y & Z of the things that you already mentioned you know my favorite phrase and the most polite way to say this is so what does success look like for you how can we facilitate your goals absolutely yeah use those exact words use those exact words like steal them and then David I think you were you had some information about how the social spaces worked and sort of that sort of thing yeah well what really worked in the social spaces were snacks

especially especially gamers love food so that's snacks are really helpful but the key thing is without serving alcohol which would have been a really bad fit for a professional interview setting so we were lucky that our host industry has provided the beverages also chose non-alcoholic to keep the insurance cost down which would have been ten thousand dollars for the event space so you have to account for event insurance especially whenever alcohol is served and co-working spaces do come with their own liability insurance already so that's great if you're willing in a co-working space if you're holding it at a game studio you have to make sure that they have a liability insurance as well IG dhq insurance doesn't cover your event because their stuff covers only things like III and such so you have to make sure that all of your insurance is covered anyway getting back to

as much as gamers like snacks they were good to have they do provide good opportunities for social interaction you know people go and gather around the staff bowl and such and really make it easier for those people that don't normally socialize well especially since we didn't have alcohol there so so even though they didn't eat a lot of snacks and snacks were still a good way to get people talking together and we also found that the recruiters hi around the snack tables and by doing so they were able to initiate conversations with the various entities and start building up those important social contacts there was one company they brought six people I believe to represent their company they had three people in the room looking through resumes while people did their one-on-one like hi my name is Jenny job mate hi Jenny job hunter and I like visual effects and they actually had three people sort of incognito for lack of a better term hang out by the snack table

and the fizzy water dispenser just making connections and they actually told me during their exit because I did an exit chat with each of them they're like yeah we took every resume that came in and then we hunted down some people that didn't come in by talking outside because it was you know they were doing the professional thing as well as the casual thing speaking of the professional thing adding a professional veneer or Sheen to your event is a major key for getting those high-impact triple or double A or triple I Studios to take you seriously next time my neck time I mean the next time you do this you're gonna be so successful you're gonna have like four of these we found that making the staff wear the same shirt ideally with a logo is a major key I know everybody hates uniforms in our industry and everyone hates suits and I totally understand that but it made it super easy for people to say go find Tiffany she's the girl in all black with a nametag on I wish I had an IG da branded shirt so

that I could wear that and said go find one of the people in IG da shirt that's a major thing it makes it more comfortable for people easier to find out who to ask questions of and you got to remember like especially for your venue stuff they don't know who you are they don't hang out with you we didn't have shirts printed so we all wore black t-shirts and Blazers considering it's gaming the Blazer was a major delineator and I highly recommend it even though we're in gaming and we all natively dislike Blazers as part of our career choices it makes your staff stand out and that's what you want looking legitimate during your meetings having your point person wear blazer even if you don't wear a blazer in life or like a black long-sleeve that's you know not fade it out and doesn't have a weird game logo on it it's a great way to work with people who don't normally work in the gaming space such as co-working spaces beverage vendors etc it's a non endemic brands like that veneer of professionalism because when you're in non gaming spaces you're competing with companies like Pepsi or

coke or uber or like tech companies and people who have a lot more budget fine and Finance than you and then Chris you had some points about documentation right documented space was one of my focuses I'm always trying to document our events to help not just show that we're doing things but really make a case for next year being able to visualize it really clearly that's why we made that short video about it's kind of a capturing what happened there helped secure the venue next year the recruiters attendees helping them see what they're getting themselves into we had a couple companies who send recruiters and we're kind of confused because they misunderstood the nature of the event even having a two minute long video showing this is what it is here's what's going on here we'll help you get a right fit between people who what they're looking for and showing up they were still happy they were there but they were kind of caught off guard legally by the way at least this is for our headquarters it is important to explicitly tell people that they will be videoed or photo thorough as documented it's required to document things at least in the state of California your laws may vary depending on your venue or who you're partnering with that may

already be covered as part of their agreement using that space that's something where I went up doing that this time I've got some equipment for other professional uses which if we did unfortunately learn the hard way that you should not go into a photography community if you do not have a photographer to advise you on the rate you should try to suggest to try to get help from someone who's professional at space obviously good photography is a expensive thing in a budget and when you're running a low cost event it might be what equipment you and your other volunteers can scramble with I would encourage not just using a smartphone that's that smartphones are not terrible and use both hands if you do yes or you can find a relatively cheap gimbal online all the streamers have them these days or borrow them from your friend who has way too much photo gear that's what I do speaking of specialized things like photo gear so we did something a little unique with our career fair and this is because we had people who are coming in from a layoff so we looked at it more like a layoff workshop instead of just a

career fair we got Jagga who's somebody I know he runs to wit Street LLC it's a counting consultancy firm to come and give 101 advice for anyone who signed up for completely confidential accounting advice for free a couple people talked to him one person seriously talked to him but no one took advantage of his services on site which means our attendees were a little bit foolish in my opinion because a lot of them ended up calling him and he's like yeah now now you've got pay it's taxi good what we learned from that is that that was a miscommunication on our part mine is the event chair and us as a chapter we should have explained more of what he was offering you need to sell the good stuff we fall into this trap of good things will sell themselves they don't good marketing sells all sorts of things so moving forward and for next time we would definitely highlight the value add of this kind of thing that you wouldn't expect at a career fair so how do you staff an event like this obviously you're going to work with what you have and the more the merrier with

volunteers but typically the things that we found were obviously there's gonna be a huge rush of people at registration you can never have enough people checking folks in and and that's a great place to have volunteers but pretty much anywhere you're assigning volunteers you want to make sure that one of the coordinators one of the people who is there organizing the event is nearby so they have someone to kind of escalate to because obviously they're not going to have the answer to all the questions it just kind of showed up as an extra pair of hands the other thing was there tends to need to be somebody that's floating around checking in with each of these groups of people and making sure all of their needs are being met so checking up the venue like hey everything's looking good you know etc etc checking with different recruiters and can we get you anything etc etc especially the recruiters are kind of locked down at tables sometimes so if you can help them out as someone who's a little more mobile than that can be great I'm just checking in with attendees and you know making sure somebody's getting a feel for if people are you know having any troubles that you can even it's like it's too hot in here it can go hacivat you turn the AC on or whatever it is you know having

people floating around in different capacities it's really helpful one of the things we found is we have a venue that was really actually well set up for this where we could put people into these phone booths but a venue like that is really distributed and where do we you know how do we tell people to get around so as soon as they come in again lack of signage but as soon as they come in they're like what do I do now and we're like well there are companies in all of these rooms there and all of these rooms there so having a person to basically air-traffic-control humans around the room and in two different places the other thing that we could have done there is maybe like you know if we really knew the venue ahead of time a little bit more printed materials as you walked in here's a map you know like you'd see at a conference or something like that and some of that was of course since we were at a co-working space worth if we didn't tell people that some of them might have been you're worried about like is that just other people who having a meeting in that room that aren't related to this event part of its neat about that same dynamic of your not taking over a hundred percent of a space makes it potentially like okay so you're a college organization running it on a campus you know you can't lock down the whole

building you're in against maybe a few classrooms or whatever you can still have people there kind of direct people like oh don't go down this hallway we're all up and down this wall over here and so you can have a space without having the whole space and opens up your options for where you could be and how flexible your growth can be as well and on the note that Chris was just talking about when we have lots of people in sort of a mixed-use space making sure that everyone had a nametag was important beyond just sort of the facilitation piece it's really kind of a security thing make sure you know who's a part of your event making sure they know who's a part of your event so that they're not you know reaching out to people who are actively working at a desk when we're at a co workspace or something like that and and I will say as well as those nametags are also potentially part of it's valuable to have an anti-harassment policy or similar types of things documented they can be up on the load of tri-folds around tables or whatnot something we did not do this year want to improve for future events but basically sometimes we get resistance from someone saying oh I don't feel like wearing a nametag it is important for being able to hold people accountable for someone's misbehaving someone's doing something they shouldn't do to be able at least have some way to tell who was who and that's an important part of that policy

yeah that was our kind of prep stuff but there's actually a bunch of like prep that you want your attendees and recruiters to be doing as well it's obvious things like reminding people to bring the resumes and their business cards and it seems very obvious but the better prepared people that come in are the better your event is gonna seem it's because your audience especially we've talked about that you know your audience is you're valued here too because this is kind of like recruiters looking for attendees attendees like and and venues looking for people to work there so if everyone's professionalism is higher your event looks better so help prep them I think David was gonna talk about some of the other lessons learned for the next time we brought a bit like some stuff that didn't work yeah one thing I think we wish we had done was request from each studio a high res logo so that we can put it on our signage would have made a lot better-looking signage then than what we had one thing that we thought would have worked out well is that we had an interview room that was called the phone booth that had

soundproofing in it and that way it allow people to have private interviews but it turned out that nobody really took us up on it because it wasn't well communicated now we had that and then what we should have done is for our survey we should have used the survey and Eventbrite rather than having it a separate Google link things we could improve upon and it didn't work we had some individuals some sort of career coach types offer do resume reviews and so there's a question on the signup forum that was would you like your resume reviewed by professional resume reviewer about 40% of people said yeah we would like that that sounds like an exceptional thing I just got laid off that vendor didn't show up we haven't heard from them since I hope nothing terrible happen to them but they just didn't they didn't come through they didn't come to the event fortunately um you know I was running point on this event so when the people

got here to sign up a resume review as you could see on their nametag which had a thousand stickers on it I apologize someone said a resume reviewer didn't arrive can I interest you in one of our other specialty products and they didn't remember signing up that they wanted resume review people often say they want things and not actually know what that means or not actually want it at the end of the day how you can account for that I'm not sure just remember that not everything people say they want is what they want and sometimes things like don't say they want they decide they want when they get there I'll say to that point if one thing that can be done to mitigate is essentially that if it something feels like a key value add for arvind is really relying on we're really pointing out like come get VR work or come get your resume reviewed or whatever to basically try to build in some redundancy thinking of it more as a panel approach less as a single point of failure just because what we figured out is just as much as not every attendee who says are going to come shows up not every studio or service who says they're gonna come show up either and so building around that is an assumption from the beginning of like if this is a key value to what we're doing how can we make sure we have three lawyers present

or whatever I mean if we can't then not wanting to overemphasize that in the messaging as to why people should be here or they show up in they're upset if if the only triple a company was supposed to be those and show up you get mad people if you don't have any other sort of back-up plan in that risk mitigation sort of strategies speaking people who didn't show up Chris can talk about our LinkedIn coaching yeah we were also hoping to have some LinkedIn critiques for the same reason as a resume reviews and like the resume reviews the LinkedIn coach did not show up fortunately we scrambled a little bit and created the indie scramble realizing that some of the people there are really you know they're open to their exploring studio work they're sporting jobs out there but also they're open the idea of finding collaborators getting their own thing rolling out here maybe meeting with our accountant to get some financial advice we would hope next year but what we did was he created that space we set aside over if it was an hour to and basically tried to invite people to be a hey if you want to call meet other potential collaborators other Indies in the area go be in this room 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. or whatever we made it and during that time we tried to encourage them to go around introduce themselves really trying to structure it to be that it's less about what happens

in that one event and more about trying to forge some connections so they might follow up after the fact of like oh you're also in mobile we should touch base on is there some way we can connect each other is there some way we can collaborate have you learned some lessons that can apply to our marketing vice versa we did have some people who kind of took over the room and sort of a show-and-tell format I would have been probably useful to have had a facilitator had we plan this event from beginning and not been a last-minute improvisation to help kind of coordinate make sure the times evenly fairly distributed or some people who are a little more talkative might kind of take things over that said for a laugh minute last minute shift it kind of worked out alright as an improvised thing so if you do end up with some empty space not sure what to do if you create kind of a structured conversation say audio room freelancers room whatever you could at least make some of those connections and create a space for them to feel like it's okay to hand out their business cards there if that's what they do any kind of decent way to improvise when you have vendors not necessarily coming through for you yeah we speaking of vendors we had a little bit of difficulty getting them to do exit interviews after its I did minor ones with each company that caught but I'd say about a third of the company's kind

of snuck out the back without saying goodbye but I wish I had scheduled straight up like one-hour video calls with a rep from each studio for the week after to you know get more qualitative data I also wish we've done that for attendees to get better numbers on like did you get paired with the studio that ended up with a job because the best metric for a career fair is how many jobs did people get out of it and we we only have soft data not hard data on that having said that several vendors dropped out last second so our numbers are a little skewed in that space and I think part of that's due to the way we handle the Eventbrite and I believe David you have more info on that right yeah one thing we wish we had done is we use the corporate version instead of our personal right because obviously one thing is that we wouldn't have had to reinvent the wheel if we had done that we also

missed out on the opportunity for collecting donations also using IG da h qs event bruh I would have reduced if we had decided to charge for tickets would have reduced any additional fees we would have that would have been charged to attendees and so that's like on the digital prep as David was saying but on the physical prep side which Drew's covered a little bit before it ended up being very heavy manual prep the day of which I did not account for as the chair on this event the big thing with stickers on nametags I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous but we blew ours manually sticking stickers on nametags to indicate the disciplines of candidate was working him I'd like to point out the reason we're talking so much about stickers is a value-add of the stickers to both the attendees and the vendors a lot of the vendors said like you know

the studios are like oh it was great I could you know stare around the room and see oh they're here for VR they're here for audio and they could start up conversations based on the info on the nametags well that told us is like okay we do need to do these stickers do we have them do it at the door when they sign in that was already a bottleneck where we want our bottleneck prepping on the front end or prepping day of we use an Avery tempura template because it was free which is our favorite word we bought the nametags at a local office supplies chain and downloaded the Avery template and just plug and chug to everything in from Eventbrite there's an extension that Eventbrite uses to make it quite easy to do that are applying your own stickers was an option for next year but the professionalism would have been less because we actually had sets thoughts on the tags at each sticker kugo almost grid it out and it's it's a bottleneck all over the place we are there a lot of bottlenecks to sign in and we're concerned about adding to that

because it was kind of we didn't plan for that bottleneck at sign-in and I think Chris you have more information about unplanned bottlenecks improv events in general or organic unplanned if you just kind of leave like oh there's couches open it'll go okay maybe maybe not there are some people who sort of professionally are charismatic your producers your professional socializers your recruiters people who just are comfortable as conversations for a lot of other folks and this is true across we find some over I do day meetups too it can be helpful if some sort of other focal point structure topic topic card we've run some other events where we just put cards on tables of things to discuss for a certain time and swap those out or we've had board games sometimes at our events where people are able to use those as something to do maybe not the right thing for a professional career fair but figure out is somebody to structure the conversation I think it's part of why we had a little more success in the indie scramble room than maybe some of other improvised open-ended spaces some of that might be partly industry although I think our stickers actually did probably help us there to where as an easy conversation starter to be like oh

you're also an audio person or oh good I actually need an artist in a cup say the kind of moment of introduction run it like people don't know how to socialize as well as you think they do because our industry can be a little awkward sometimes they're stressed out and nervous and they're not used to wearing a suit and and it's awkward to try and sell yourself it's much easier to sell somebody else like oh my friend jenny is amazing at three Modelling you need to see her portfolio is way easier than being like I make really good pitch decks I swear like it's it's helpful that way and then David you had more information on our major challenges if I remember correctly yeah big challenges you don't only have to consider the jobseekers to make your event attractive for but you also have to make it attractive for hiring companies so if they really want to come to your event and getting the big studios to show up proved to be a challenge I thought it'd be a lot easier because I

had a lot of connections and I knew personally that I can invite by the way if you don't know connections to invite what you should do is partner with your local IG da chapter and that's the sort of thing they love to do they love sharing their connections and they can help you put in touch but even though that that we personally do a lot of connections and we contacted triple-a studios and a lot of them had confirmed that they would show up none of them actually did and there there might have been reasons for that maybe they didn't give them enough notice maybe it was cause a lot of them were personal connections and I unfortunately I was traveling at the time we had a we had the event so I wasn't able to follow up with them it might have been that they realized they didn't have positions they really needed to seek in time maybe they had things coming up we don't know

exactly why they did it but it unfortunately was a little bit embarrassing for us because we want to be able to promote that we had these great studios that would be there and we weren't able to fulfill on that and so it was a little bit embarrassing that we cooked and set up rooms for them and they didn't appear but anyway lesson learned that we need to follow up better we should have had them sign a form stay in contact with them and really keep on top of everyone who had RSVP to make sure they were gonna show up and with that on the on the other side of that from the giant studio is the small to medium size studios a few I was impressed basically you know Johnny's to be like I said there might not need a specific type of job right now if they see us as bringing out the demographic the small medium sized studios number of them kind of came out and said we just want to get to know who's in our area because sometimes though ad they're small enough they're flexible enough they're adaptable enough they might realize that once they find someone who's really good at a certain type of talent it can change what they're doing in a way that the bigger company might

have kind of already its plans are pretty locked in place that was actually need dynamic we have a couple of studios I think TV games might be one of who were there basically - let's talk about your resume we're not trying to a snoo by his time but we're not specifically hiring for this particular role well they get on our radar because any given time we don't know what contract work or spinning up and then they want to have access to those people in our community and I think it was actually surprising flexibility for the small studios that kind of I hadn't expected going into it so don't discount smaller mid-sized studios everyone wants to work it you know epic or Sony and Nintendo but don't you know forget the medium our little guys the studios that have like less than 15 employees because there's a lot of opportunity there yeah I did from that angle I run a work-for-hire shop and we have that exact problem all the times like I have no idea what the next contract is going to be I might need nine contractors across an entire the entire spectrum of game development to get moving and so just having those contacts and knowing that there's people out there looking or freelancing or what-have-you extremely extremely valuable for for me as a small

business owner speaking of value funding money yeah I'm the treasurer that's what I talked about funding the event is you know part of why you're here we talked about our pitfalls I got to talk about our fiscal pitfalls a career fair charges tables charges companies at a table rate generally between one and five thousand US dollars for a you know three by six Costco table but to be fair you got to find these things somehow that's how they make money that's how these things like pay for stuff like insurance and snacks and nametags we used an impact grant an impact grant it's from IG da headquarters and every chapter can use up to a thousand of it a year it has to impact the community you know on screen you'll see the requirements headquarters has for it it could cover everything from printing name tags to snacks to possibly subsidizing parking as long as this part of something that positively impacts the

community the vast majority of IG DEA chapters don't use theirs and that includes cigs so it's not just like LA or Norway it can be like Latin X in gaming eSports like whatever it's use-it-or-lose-it money and so this isn't supposed to be an ad for the IJ da by the way this is not what this is but what we found is our infrastructure that we've had is the part of IG da has really underpinned a lot of the stuff we could have done as opposed to for people trying to make this happen in a corner so pair with your chapter there's one basically everywhere finding a venue that would take us for free was an exercise in cold calling I personally really actively dislike cold calling it's uncomfortable and bad at socializing I don't like it I got one response out of 65 calls I saw it co-working spaces would be useful I thought the public libraries would be useful both of those wanted to charge me three to five thousand dollars

for the space and maybe the library things just an la thing but I didn't realize you had to rent your library I thought my taxes paid for that apparently that's not true I tried with friends and nice work buildings they had security issues and stuff they couldn't handle it restaurants needed a buyout I was like can we just use your space when no one's in here you could keep serving food to everyone else but can we just take like ten tables in the corner and they were like no you need to buy us out for five K plus the cost of food and I was like well that's not happening the local Women's Club headed a venue they also wanted a buyout the elbe the LGBT YMCA wanted a buyout as well every community center won a buyout I understand everyone's got to make money somehow it was really surprising to me how many venues required a buyout I had to call individual locations okay so a lot of things when it's your weworks your spaces you're industrious or you're the wings they have an HQ and they also have individual chapters

HQ for every single organization I called said no bar none hey every single one of them said no I actually ended up using Google Maps to find the local phone numbers of my local co-working branches two of industriousness branches said yes specific to location I went to a local Chamber of Commerce meeting with the city of Santa Monica and I met someone who's the head of programming for the local Santa Monica wework chapter now I know we works not everyone's favorite right now but they do have big spaces that gentleman was shocked he's like what do you mean we said no and I'm like I called you you said no and he's like are you kidding me this is exactly the kind of event we want to host in our big communal spaces and I'm still in contact with them up for another event with another organization I work with so HQ saying no doesn't always mean no because the local chapters have more flexibility in certain things also think outside of your gamedev Network you don't have to use the canteen at a studio speaking of things we need to run the career fair

drew do you want to talk more about actual like logistics once you find the space yeah I mean there's a bunch of equipment concerns it's about obtaining venues and obtaining equipment at venues obviously for a lot of career fairs it's tables might be signage it might be a variety of things I think this is one of those things where you gotta understand what's things you're most constrained by if you have a budget there are a lot of places that are set up with facilities to handle this if you go ask a hotel they will tell you what the rental prices are they'll give you a sheet this long if you go ask a college they have a facilities department they'll give you a rental sheet of things that are this long usually they're pretty expensive but I mean it you know know which things that are your constraints if you are trying to find a venue that you're trying to save money etc etc again it comes down to like how can I help those people or who can i partner with that's sort of on the inside at a college this is usually like I need a professor to sponsor me or I need a student group who's really invested because those people are usually able to obtain

classrooms or gymnasiums or whatever for free we had tried to do the same three four years ago there used to be a startup out here on the west side of LA that they had monthly meetups or meet up to work out there they loved but basically they wanted people to know where they were their brand what they did to know their people and again that would have been great for their unfortunate longer out there but everybody has come from figuring out okay who wants to be on that map who wants those kind of connections somebody potentially but this is something where you have to have a high expected failure rate this is a thing obviously it's equally true for the people that they're applying for jobs it's part of the discouraging process if they are applying for 10 or 20 to get maybe one or two or three options to hopefully consider and that you know this is something where a lot of our people that we work with are coming from maybe engineering disciplines or some other field where if you do the right steps the algorithm computes you get the end result or you ace the math assignment this is a fundamental business operation so it's gonna be low yield and that if you're doing 65 calls and getting a few yeses that's great and there's no

shortcut to that besides getting really used to the rejection and to point out like again that doesn't mean you're failing at it doesn't mean you - you're doing everything wrong that's part of the process if you're trying to operate a low budget of that budgets translating to legwork instead of capital you're able to invest in a known quantity like a hotel establishment or paying for college space you don't have a direct in it mm-hmm and speaking of business because I do I come in from the business people doing business side of things here's some tips that I know from MySpace that might help people who aren't from that space don't use words like unemployment or laid off when you're trying to get his face people don't really like hearing that it's not an appealing demographic you have to sell the venue on yourself and your organization before your thing the venue wants to know our demographics what percentage of your people are Latinos who use the word engineers they'll ever say you can give us a demographic breakdown of the people in your organization you know make sure you can define it before you go in and talk

about your target demographics it's not just people who make games frame it as a business and use business language for products market fit creative entrepreneurs is a good word for Indies lean startups is a great name for two-man studios it's not about what the things are it's about how they're presented the town at an example we use why industrious liked us is like oh we skew high male but compared to our industry average were actually quite diverse you show a state of comparison between two things people love that largely mid twenties has college degrees like the way you can slice and dice your people the more ways you can slice and dice ed in the way you can present said slicing and dicing will really assist you in getting what you need and then David you were talking more about you know trying

to get free stuff and how to market it and all that yeah well particularly getting the venues because only between you actually have a place you're gonna hold the event can you really get people to read it to actually come to it so the the venue this is probably the most important thing of all and you know everyone says they know somebody they know someplace it's real easy I have a place I know I can get a free venue at but when it really comes down to it it's really tough as Tiffany just said she made over 60 calls and nobody wanted to do it even despite dangling a little carrot of because we're a non-profit they might save as much as like three thousand dollars off your taxes that that still wasn't able to do it I went and I looked at a number of different restaurants that we could hold it at but the noise level was too high I thought for for holding meetings and holding interviews and some of the foot traffic was really poor people

getting in and out that's that's something you really have to consider the flow of the people within the place a lot of people say that oh let we can only at a university or a college easier said than done turns out universities booked their spaces way in advance and we tried a number them a warrant lucky also there's tremendous parking problems often at universities you really have to consider your venue first consider such things as who you know who you can contact give them a lot get a lot of advance notice because places get booked hooked up very early no matter what you think only what type of place you're all as much advance notice for booking things in is really helpful consider how people are gonna move we're gonna set up stations and parking yeah to be Nelson that are for one thing one of the reasons why the university is so important to have that connection like we said earlier kind of a professor's

pet project is that anytime companies are coming onto a college campus that college campus wants to charge those companies that's part of how they operate on their accessing their students and they're essentially clients and so on and so that's where it needs to be was like we said sort of been in over there in terms of snacks and everything keep in mind we did not do this in this case but I remember a few years back some small I think it was a game jam whatever hit up my small company at the time I was just me started out to sponsor their snacks which like okay the thing is if you try to hit up a giant company there what kind of hand you snack money a small cup but it was like yeah I can spare fifty or hundred bucks on snacks which is not a bunch of money to even a beginning company but it felt cool to get my name on there you might be surprised again it's like the people who show up sometimes the small companies the approval is the only person you're talking to and they're like yeah I can do that here's a check and so you might be surprised that here and there might be able to add up on funding some snacks that's not coming out of your pocket or your tiny budget you're already working from in terms of our parking burger bottom like again we kind of knew this is an LA challenge it was expensive

parking and so much so that we did receive some hate mail some people were frustrated at the cost especially knowing it was for people who are in a laid-off situation when you're doing things it's going to attract some opinions of it and that's gonna always come with you're doing anything there's gonna be a range of people some people like it some people wish it was done differently kind of having to kind of accept that part of it is absorbing some blame and that's hopefully still the puck the positives outweigh the negatives of the good that you're doing and so it's also being just simply empathetic to the fact that when you're trying to have people who aren't necessarily laid off between work still trying to find the first footing and maybe people who are coming from there in stressful situations they are counting on certain things so being patient with that as you're trying to to help people and do it all that you can adapt the community that that's part of the the process and the cost kind of factor into what goes into doing it in terms of printing we were very fortunate once again here was place where our host industrious was able to deliver they actually offered to do our printing for us that included like a massive Kinkos like banner but as long

as you know those things early on of like potentially our venue might be able to account for some of those services if you can sort this things out sooner or later might be a better take advantage of those kind of opportunities I think Druce and PR marketing thoughts yeah generally I thought you know we were really happy to event seemed to be successful for our size but we needed to leverage our presence online and all these things better we needed to get the messaging out in four different ways something that I think people don't often think about you I mean obviously on Facebook and you know Instagram or whatever people are Twitter if people are following you on but for professional events LinkedIn is huge if you're a job seeker you're on LinkedIn if you're a recruiter you're on LinkedIn so we didn't have our LinkedIn presence up to date at that time and we didn't really grow it as much as we could have if we were to leverage that for our next event which I hope we can it'll be really powerful on top of that there's a lot more data we could've been gathering that Eventbrite we funneled things in from Facebook and from Twitter and

things like that if we were to just use backlinks or shortened URLs with data attached to that we'd absolutely be able to know okay most of our traffic is coming from Twitter so maybe we should spend more effort there or it's coming from our mailing list let's see how we could grow our mailing like that that kind of thing just to focus our efforts because anytime you're working with nonprofits and small companies or whatever you kind of get into this space where you're doing a shotgun approach to marketing and it's on very high effort operation but if you're able to know which pieces are giving you the value you could save yourself a lot of time and honestly can be a lot more successful investing in the one thing that's giving you the most outcome on the other side of getting people to show up we got a new building into the plans like any event not everyone who says they're gonna RSVP on Facebook urban bride is actually gonna be there and first off we just kind of Google its average rate of people who don't show up for Eventbrite we found about forty to forty to fifty percent which is also consistent with our casual meet ups as a chapter we hold anyway in terms of we might have twenty to thirty shows for an event that fifty people respond yes to so it seemed to kind of live her

expectations and so you know going off of that the attendees getting specific data in advance from people who say they're coming is important.we says had a pre vetting survey but the problem is people didn't want to fill it in or they just put in gibberish or made stuff up working our data like it would say like what do you do for work do artists engineer our audio other and they'd put like unicorns and I'm like that is not a sticker I have in front of you to put all your Dave tag and it was until we started parsing that data and looking at some of the charts that Eventbrite generates I was just like oh no speaking oh no you got to be ready to hold your ground politely and appropriately as people try to push or bull you into comping things that you shouldn't I'm gonna say this right now it is not industry-standard to comp anything at a career fair do not let anyone tell you otherwise whether it's parking or their parking ticket or

whatever there is a clear management of expectations in terms of I think our page might even big probably all capitals like parking is X amount which is a double digit expensive amount we encourage ride shares or public transit etc giving them a heads up helps make it easy if you have to afterwards to point to the thing and be like you opted to do the thing we let you know just kind of helps prevent or reduce and manage as many of those conversations you can have we did have in terms of feedback we received some positive feedback so we mentioned earlier our friend the financial advisor who did not get as many interactions as we were hoping for him during the event but we did have people hit him up after the event to do their taxes for their company this year so it's still a worthwhile thing for me to be out there sharing those business cards making those connections we were trying to figure out a better way to get follow-up from our different organizations that were there we know it was valuable for some of them but we would love to it this is where we would share some quotes if we had them and like we said a lot of them kind of ghosted us on the surveys after the fact they kind of felt like they built up for an event they were done they were

exhausted granted they got other priorities to go to next but working out a way to get that sort of notes from them just like it's valuable for us to document the event on video and show look this is a real thing that happens getting those sort of quotes and feedback we might be trying to find still ways yet to get a hold of them to get some notes of how I was in retrospect those help you land new venues next time those help you sell the event to other people who might come out those are important in worth finding ways to figure out we have not rocked that puzzle but we acknowledge that's the thing we are trying to improve at there were some series that were unhappy with the clientele we brought in we might hand wave and say to extent there's only so much we can control about that there was one who wanted some very high-level people but here's a case where even there we couldn't manage expectations better if we had been able to get that company to fill out their pre survey where they did not let us know that's who they were looking for until it was sort of already too late you know managing expectations and stuff is important and on that note we actually had a mid-sized studio who really loved us they were incredibly happy they're experienced and they didn't expect to be so happy with their experience they not only found who they

wanted but also people they didn't realize they wanted and they added it to their database later for when they got back to HQ because I knew they'd be hiring in a couple months for those roles right on in terms of getting our logistics out again we hit up basically every channel we could we also we had our townhall a couple months prior and we really tried to drill in there that this was an important event coming up on the calendar so it can be an opportunity to kind of basically build up to that event so by the time it's kind of people are asking about when's that going on I heard that's a thing that's happening and we did see some of that response on our Facebook event which I think was helpful to us we didn't charge people again our context here was this we're mostly largely trying to create this to help people were laid off that said there is some sort of trade-offs between if you charge even a nominal amount maybe three dollars maybe five dollars we have some internal dialogues about if it makes sense for us to do it for our next one obviously you're gonna get fewer respondents but you might have a much higher rate of people who feel like I paid for this I'm gonna show up and you might have a much better therefore hit rate on promising your attendee or your company's coming who's gonna be there based on they paid for it they're

probably going to be here even if it's not a huge amount for volunteers it's good to ask them at least a month in advance even if the people who are not necessarily specialists with a camera or other kinds of certain work it's still a case even if it's something you could be doing but a volunteer could do it instead that frees you up to do work that they might not be able to take care of based on who they know they're who they invited their stuff that you have the authority as the person facilitating or administering it to take care of I've got a couple notes from I think David on P pre recording some email correspondences yeah it's important to have a good communications plan when you're holding in a bin like this and so it helps to write out plan out what the email is you're gonna send and write them out well ahead of time because you find when you're when you're preparing for a bit like this you don't have time to think about these things laying out your emails ahead of time like write an email and send out to thank people when they signed up then maybe another one five days or a week before 10 or 14 days before and then a 24 hours before the

event just continual reminders so that people don't forget about it and to build up the anticipation for the event another one to add about those pre scheduling the emails is so important because you'll be exhausted you'll be scary we'll be scrambling just before it you'll be tired right after it if you've written them a few weeks in advance it may not seem fun or easy to do but it lets you not stress out about at the time and the emails will still go out yeah and in the same way that you want to schedule stuff beforehand and send out emails to prep people it's really helpful to send one out afterwards just a thank you to people make sure the last interaction is positive and kind of keep up that relationship for the next time if it's a recruiter or whatever the next time you're hosting an event we need to contact them again and that's also a great opportunity to kind of share some of the data that you've gathered at this point and provide extra value back to these people whether it's a venue or telling them who showed up or recruiters giving them a list of the candidates cetera and you know there's some sort of nuts and bolts technical stuff as well in terms of verbiage strategy timing all that make sure you fit your venue we've

said it over and over and over again the venue's going to be the most important thing right for closing I want to encourage we'll put your email addresses up how to context in the chapter for IG da if you have questions about it we'd love to discuss them with you if you have tips opportunities better ways to fund things better kind of æneas look for we are as much as anything not just trying to say this is how it's done we're trying to create that conversation and learn from you as well and your experiences it would really benefit us as we are continuing try to run career fairs as well thank you for taking the time to join us today and also thank you of course David drew and Tiffany I'm Chris Thank You Evan for being here thank you bye everyone bye