Leveraging key learnings in UA to happily grow your studio

so thank you all for being here and thanks for staying with me and listening I know that you know whether you're growing right now we're hiring right now you will be at some point touching recruitment or having an opportunity to help your teams scale and help them grow a small story that I wanted to kind of share with you was I had an opportunity 2011 I stumbled upon a video podcast this week in startups it was a young junior recruiter and had an opportunity to listen to the CEO on this podcast talking about this little scrappy company that he was trying to build headquartered in Copenhagen and just got funding to grow their team in San Francisco and they were again democratizing this thing called game development found that to be really interesting and kind of bizarre and in

such an audacious and sane goal I really started to dig a little bit deeper and follow I ended up actually having an opportunity to be unities first global recruiter in-house I'm gonna walk you a little bit through some of the lessons that I learned that I've taken through my career on really seeing that that that divergence of building amazing can you be too the company generally to grow your developer base my team like I said I've got eleven years of recruiting in-house wear rum I'm gonna be sharing a little bit of some of the tools that we use with helping our studios at the end so if you want to connect with us or I just find me after you absolutely can however you are familiar with simon Sinek and start with why okay that's not all okay the golden circle and kind of starting with why is what you do and the company that you have is not the hook I'm gonna repeat that again what you do and what

you're building here is not the hook that's gonna get people into your Studios it's not gonna get people investing their passion their creativity their energy into helping you grow and into helping you grow your product why matters why is actually really the core of what matters most and a lot of what we're going to talk about or what I'm going to talk about over the next few minutes it's the purpose and your purpose is the key to connecting with challenge it's what's gonna keep them up working weekends keep them working I'm just investing their energy their creative energy into you starting with why and there's some fantastic things on YouTube from Simon's TEDx talk that he did but again I'll leave the link for them at the end of the call the end of the presentation he really talks a lot about you know having that opportunity for your your leaders and your talent teams or just your fear people in general to really understand what it is that you're doing why you're trying to do this what problem are you solving why are you differentiating yourselves

and what is your purpose here so the biggest lesson that I've heard and I think it's really great kind of being in the middle of this track session today because there's so much I've been here listening and tracking so much data coming out of our two talks already that building community and starting with why is very qualitative it's really hard to kind of think a little bit about okay well hey this is our why this is why we're doing this how are we even really going to track that success in terms of scaling the team and it is really difficult but it's the reason that you know for a lot of people here that might come from or might be an indie teams or might be with companies that are quite small okay to your companies and came to join your leaders for a reason and you saw a vision in your leaders and you believed in what they were doing so much so that you may have left bigger companies left bigger paychecks left benefits and everything else to come and join this quest so building that community and starting with that community to really think about okay well why does this matter to us is the most important thing when you're thinking about hiring when

you don't have a huge product or brand to stand on the community is going to be there to really help you know evangelize what you're doing and they're going to be your cheerleaders they're gonna be your ambassadors when you're not they're gonna be the people that are helping you bring people to your studios and to your companies when you're not there or when you're doing other things and I found this to be especially true at unity when I started in 2011 was that you know the company was so small but at the same time they had this incredible community of developers and creators many of you polio in this room today or have been you know in our interaction with unity in some way shape or form that just loved this company so much and I think they were and I at least in my belief they were fell in love or became passionate about that that mission and that purpose to do something greater to democratize game development came across this guy at a conferences of back in 2012 who actually this is real like actually tattooed a unity logo onto his

arm it wasn't something that we were passing out at a conference and that just shows you to me oh you know obviously really absurd but also just incredible that somebody cares so much about what you're doing and that you know back in the day when you think of how unity as a company is now they really had an opportunity to change a lot of lives people that were able to develop games and follow their dreams and follow their own curiosity with technology that was never accessible to them before so you think about like your talent and you think about like where you're going obviously there's a lot of different things I think mentioned something earlier or right at the end of his last talk that you know less than 50% of the people interact with you a badge the same is true for job ads as well and we spend a lot of money and you're gonna spend a lot of money thinking about how to publicise and how to advertise for your openings unless you're again putting your why and really thinking about the various stages of does talent even know who you are okay are they considering what you're

doing and they think it's interesting are they thinking about coming on board are they interested in actually hearing what you're doing when joining your forces there's a lot of different pieces to talents kind of connection or beginning of connection with your company and your brand that's really important to consider so that if you're thinking about advertising and if you're thinking about job ads you're really spending that money in a much I think a much more precise in a more impactful way than a traditional job ad so I always like to think about striking that balance between acquisition and retention where you can actually again focus on building that community talent acquisition and the same thing in the UA side if you got these referrals are king knowing and being able to access your network and talking to your network constantly in sharing content sharing content and contributing back in a way where I talked about kind of Reddit discord Cora and Facebook if anybody on discord right now for connecting with their communities outside of games yeah

awesome so it's a really great way to make sure that you're having meaningful conversations and having conversations with your player community where they're thinking about while they're doing really great things here or there really Billy building break products how can I consider myself to be a part of this team and actually join what they're doing celebrating those wins and losses and celebrating diversity as well is a really important piece to remember that when you're hiring or when you will be hiring just putting information out into your community on what you need is not a way to actually give back so contribute share content share opportunities for people to share their artwork or share information those are things that really matter Instagram posts and stories are really really well received I think when I spent recently seven hundred dollars on a job board that yielded me two resumes that weren't anywhere near what we actually needed I realize that you can spend a lot than half of that money on building an Instagram post that's sponsored

connecting to your target audience connecting to your player your slash target community and really getting some more engagement and more visibility on what you actually need talent fairs are really great and have anybody heard of game Smiths or started using game Smith awesome so I've been spending some time game Smith is there started by a new they're a new company a new platform and they're kind of thinking about themselves as like the LinkedIn specifically for the game industry so you have makers on game Smith they have a database it's specifically only for game development studios but I've been speaking with them a lot and I really love what they're doing because they don't allow agency recruiters which is I want it because I'm actually kind of like an external agency recruiter but because we work embedded so we kind of have this unique relationship with how we support different studios and creative companies but game Smith is a fantastic way to actually access a database and access a community of

people of makers in our industry that are considering new opportunities and are engaging and sharing their content on the platform itself retention is another big piece obviously talent acquisition and hiring and growing your Studios isn't important unless you're thinking about how to actually keep those amazing people in-house you know scheduling posts so content and social media obviously can be really overwhelming when you're thinking about building your talent and your people brand and building those relationships that lasts so there's tons of technology and tons of tools out there that allow you to automate social posts and content and the same is true for you know thinking about your talent acquisition that you're constantly driving new content and information out there and just interacting with your people interacting with them and allowing your community to you know give you feedback to talk about you know an update if you know sharing things like birthdays or even just like you know renovations in your studio small things like that give people a glimpse into your world that they that just allow them to kind of

strengthen that connection and once one is really checking that ego to adverse or stopping to check the ego at the door I always like to think of myself or think of like any of the studios that I work with is you're not the best come in with a sense of humility and an opportunity to be vulnerable and be the underdog I think at the end of the day people love an opportunity to join a team and to join a quest where you're fighting against the the Goliath and you're up against an opportunity to create an impact and have an impact in this community that is bigger than the role that you're actually doing yourself so be having being vulnerable and being the underdog can take a lot of different forms obviously in smaller studios I think one of the things is just just being honest and having that sense of humility hyper hippo is one of the studios that I work really closely with and I know there's a couple of speaker's here today and they share their story online and it's a story of initial failures it's the story of falling on your face and getting up

and kind of being that phoenix that rises out of the ashes and we get a lot of really good feedback from talent and just from people in general that have an opportunity to learn about why they're there where they came from and why they're making games in the first place as you grow and as you become a 500-person studio or a thousand person studio or ten thousand person studio or company for that matter connecting to that why and where it all started allows your people and your talent to remember and stay connected to the energy that they invest in to you every single day I will have some if you are hiring or if you're growing right now and you want to better understand how to track things like okay so we're putting social code posts down and we're job ads and things like that I'm gonna share a lot of the tools or some of the basic tools that I use to track our candidate and talent flow as well as some of the things we use to help curate and pull that why and that story with the clients that we work with so if you're interested connect

with me and I'll be happy to share those templates with you thanks which I found interesting about this is that the comparisons for me are about if you look at trying to get your audience growth versus your talent growth there's some key parameters in there which are actually I think the softer things that you've talked about this this ability to have authenticity the ability to be able to communicate the values of the company I think those are things which we often forget about when we're looking at kind of you know it's a little bit to me about the kind of idea of the difference between brand marketing versus direct-response a classically-trained market here so I have to think like this is it well is that the heart do you think of of the problem is it let's say I think there's a similarity in the problem which is what is the heart of what the gait of the company is a lot of

marketing people are focused on what's the most expedient way to get somebody do you think that there's more lessons like that that some of the people in the room could could learn from in terms of the finding the y21 absolutely I mean I think that you know at the end of the day and I said the kind of earlier is I evil coming together or you're working in companies and you're working with teams we're beyond the what that was exciting to you I think looking internally as well and thinking about why you show up to do what you do and what you're passionate about is a great way to connect to your company we forget very easily when we've got that game that's making the millions or we're working with a company that's experiencing hyper growth that everything then tends to refocus and we shift into the what but the qualitative piece of the why is where you keep your community strong and through the thick and thin as well there's gonna be games that aren't gonna be doing well or times where you did a relief or you did and you feature that you know didn't do well in your community or didn't do well with

your players so it's trying to find that that that balance of making sure that you're constantly reinvesting into building community and not just in network yeah I think I hope principle of the authenticity and kind of the values that you have as a company are the factors that are going to help people stay with you how almost filter the right people to identify your products