Learnings From Our Most Recent Hiring Experience (2024)

Hi friends!

I’m back with another blog post about hiring—we recently hired a wonderful artist and wanted to share the experience in the hopes that either employers or folks looking for work can learn something from our process. We were looking for a UI & 2D artist who could do a wide variety of things as we’re a small team, but hopefully this post will apply to any job postings in game development.

This post will focus on the following topics with learnings throughout:

• The job posting and applications
• Application review
• Interviewing & tests

Diversity and equity are at the core of Clever Endeavour Games and you’ll see these themes throughout the post, so they won’t have their own section. If DEI isn’t worked into every aspect of your hiring process, you should review your processes and ensure that it is.

This is a good time to acknowledge my positioning—I realize that this blog post is adjacent to discussions of DEI in the games industry, and it’s important to recognize that I’m contributing to this discussion as a white man who is also the head of a (small) successful game development studio. I’m offering my experience to share learnings and encourage reflection on hiring practices, but recognize that I’m still learning too and that there are likely aspects of this discussion that I’m missing!

Learnings and mistakes we made will show up throughout the post in bold.

Let’s get to it.

The Job Posting & Applications Received

In my 2021 blog post about hiring, I talk about writing a job description to maximize the potential of attracting diverse talent, so I won’t cover that here. Since 2021 we’ve been making sure to focus on this and have been very happy with the results.

In case you’re curious about the job posting and seeing some of these learnings in action, you can see it here.

First learning: someone mentioned that they really liked how communication was the top requirement in our job post—will do this again! It’s extremely important to our organization, especially with hybrid/remote work.

Applications & Sorting

We received a lot more applications than expected—I (naively) expected only around 60 applications, but in the end we had 353(!). I spoke to others both on our team and from other studios after and they weren’t surprised by the number given that it was an artist position. There’s a ton of competition to get art jobs (and honestly most jobs) in games.

We were hoping to get someone in Montreal or at least in Canada, but made the job available to folks outside of these regions in case we couldn’t find the talent we were looking for locally. We received 163 applications from people who were not legally allowed to work in Canada. Of the remaining 190 applications, we probably had another 40 or so who had no experience anywhere close to what we were asking for (for example, folks with an IT background who had never studied or worked in art and had no portfolio). Had we known that we would get over 300 applications, we wouldn’t have made this open to folks who are not legally allowed to work in Canada. This was a waste of our time and the time of those people who applied.

We looked almost exclusively at portfolios seeing as this was an art application. Portfolio first—if that was good, we looked at cover letters. If those were good (enough), we looked at CVs. The cover letter should explain the work on the CV that is relevant to the job, so this definitely makes the CV the last stop. This might be a personal thing, but especially for art, the understanding of art fundamentals will show up in your portfolio and I don’t need to know (or care) whether you went to art school or not.

Okay, down to around 150. We sorted through the applications by having three members of the team look through the spreadsheet with all applicants and mark in red the ones who were not up for consideration. If there was a chance they might be considered, we would leave those cells white. This helped us to break up the task and not have one person spend days on this, and it also sped up the process so that we could get back to applicants faster. We went through the remaining ones together and did another pass, marking most in red until we were down to only around 15-20. For those 15-20, we discussed them and I leaned heavily on our art director’s sense to tell us who was a better or worse fit.

Some potential areas of bias:

• Time of day — if it’s the end of the day and you’ve just seen 20 applications, you’re much less likely to give as much time and attention to the 21 as you did to the first one of the day. Depending on the person reviewing the application and their energy levels, hunger levels, etc. this can affect the reading. We tried to avoid this by having others on the team review candidates as well.
• Whether someone had been recommended by another dev or a friend — this didn’t make us judge their portfolio less critically, but it did lead to, for example, asking them to explain more about their work. This is of course special treatment that is unfair, but we tried to avoid this by having others on the team, who didn’t know the applicant, review their portfolio.
• In my previous blog post I have a big section on potential areas of bias and questions to ask yourself as an employer, so check that out!

Another learning was that we asked for references in the initial job post form—some applicants said they weren’t comfortable providing these unless asked. This was a mistake! In hindsight I think it’s inappropriate to ask for references and contact information for those references without knowing that you plan to follow up with the applicant.

Applicant Profiles

In these applications we saw a wide variety of work and profiles, but the most common ones were:

1. animators or artists who had no experience working in games, but had experience animating for cartoons or client work in either 2D or 3D, or using motion graphics
2. game artists who were 3D modelers or animators but had nothing on their portfolio about any 2D work

This leads me to the next learning: include everything you’ve done on your portfolio, and check with others in your field if you think it’s embarrassingly bad—they’ll almost certainly reassure you that it’s good enough to include. There were a couple of applicants whose 3D work or TV animation work was so good that we reached out to ask if they had other stuff they weren’t sharing—one of the 3D artists shared a large portfolio of life drawing, cartoon sketches and more which helped their application in a huge way.

Oh, another thing: if you’re an artist, please include life drawings in your portfolio! This is such a good way to show other artists, assuming they’re involved in the hiring process (which they should be), that you have a good understanding of the fundamentals of drawing humans, and likely other anthropomorphic beings.

We received almost no applications from people who had any experience with UI, even though it was in the job title. I’m not sure where those folks are! But they weren’t applying for this job—we had two, maybe three who had experience with this. That said, people can learn and part of maximizing the potential for diversity in your job application process is to understand that if someone has the necessary fundamentals, they can learn the craft you need them for. So we still did move forward with interviews for candidates who did not have games UI experience.

Where Did Applications Come From?

The best applicants came from people who reached out directly after I posted on a mailing list of other studio leads in the game development industry. This process was also super helpful because some game developers who I trust and know well recommended people they had worked with in the past, and this was a huge boost to their applications. This of course introduces bias and it’s important to note that if this was the entire job search process, it would only favour those who already have experience in the “right” places with the “right” people—i.e. the people who are already in power in already successful organizations.

Because of this potential bias, we also posted the job in as wide a variety of places as possible. This included in mailing lists from organizations in Montreal that aim to help promote gender equity in the games industry, as well as other community organizations whose missions align with our own surrounding diversity and equity. We also posted the job on WorkWithIndies, a lovely site that I personally think is the best place to post/find indie game dev jobs.

We weren’t getting a lot of applications at the start, so I started reaching out to individuals on LinkedIn who had the tag #readytowork. I ended up getting the trial for the LinkedIn business plan so that I could reach out directly to more people. This didn’t create any good leads—I mostly ended up with folks who were looking for AAA work (large companies like Ubisoft, Warner Bros, etc.) and not indie game work (smaller companies like us). Some potential leads did come about as folks answered me saying they knew someone who might be interested in the job. Again, this didn’t result in any promising applications, but I would do it again for the chance that it does.

We did not post the job through LinkedIn jobs, Indeed, or other services other than WorkWithIndies. In the last 4 jobs that we’ve posted, Indeed has not once given us even a single candidate that made it to the interview round (or anywhere close). LinkedIn was not as terrible, but still not good. In both cases, the people applying used features like “quick apply” meaning they put absolutely no work into the application, which makes sense since most of them didn’t work in this field at all. But then we still have to sort through them!

Responding to Applicants

As we went through the process of deciding who would not be considered for the job, we sent batch emails to tell applicants that they did not get the job. A number of people responded thanking us for getting back to them quickly, or for responsing to them at all. Some places don’t even send you anything if you didn’t get the job(!!). As a matter of basic respect for the people applying to the job, send them an email telling them they weren’t considered for the job as soon as you know.

We batched applicants into different groups and sent the same email to the next group once we were sure they were no longer in the running. When we had about 15 left, we told them all that we needed some more time and that we’re sorry that we hadn’t gotten back to them sooner. That said, our process is so much faster than the average (especially large companies) that I don’t imagine anyone had an issue with it. Once we got to the interview round, we interviewed 4 people but kept the other 9 around in case all of the interviews went poorly. After the interviews and tests, we knew we would go with one of those 4 we picked so we told the other 9 that they did not get the job, and provided a couple of paragraphs of explanation why—whether that was portfolio feedback, cover letter feedback, or explaining the other reasons (for example one candidate was really good but outside of Canada and with a very different time zone).

Art Tests

I went back and forth a bit in my mind about doing art tests, and I’m very glad that we did it in the end. We did a paid test (of course), and decided on six hours during a period of 10h, paid at $40/h.

The timing was chosen to allow applicants time to complete the test (since we were asking for UI and basic animation) and within a broader time period of 10h so that they could choose when they do it. This was sent on a Thursday morning, and the tests needed to be done by end of day Monday—this allowed applicants to choose a weekend day or a weekday for the work. **Quick note about inclusion here: often the people who are marginalized by our industry also tend to be in situations where they have less free time or less flexible schedules. Giving a short, fixed window will lead to more and better tests done by people with a time and flexibility privilege, which goes against our goals of inclusion.** Once they gave me their available 10h time slot, I scheduled emails to go out at the start of their time slot so they couldn’t get a head start (i.e. work way too long on something without compensation).

The $40/h pay was chosen because the job post said $70k+ salary, and there are 260 working days in the year according to the Canada Revenue Agency, so divide the yearly salary by 260, then by 7 (for 7h per day of work) and you get just under $40.

One possible source of bias with the test is that we asked applicants to think outside the box and be creative — We had some younger women applicants whose tests were not as “outside the box” as one of the male applicants—could it be that women, especially younger women, are less likely to take creative risks in tests/interview settings because our culture tells women to stay small and quiet and not to be bold? Creativity was important to us for this role, so how can we try to encourage that creative risk-taking more next time we have a test? We will make a point to address this head-on and next time, we will encourage all applicants to take creative risks, understanding that this can be harder to do naturally for more junior people or people holding identities that have been marginalized in our industry.

Vibe Checks & Interviews

I did a vibe check call before the art test, and then interviews were done after the test. Vibe check calls are super important even though they risk introducing biases. In the past, I avoided doing vibe check calls because I wanted to avoid bias—I had read a lot about how vibe checks lead to seeing how similar you are to the potential candidate and then influence you to hire people who are like you (i.e. not diverse relative to you or your organization). That said, I’ve had experiences where a vibe check call probably would have helped me to learn more about potential employees and avoid issues in the long-term, either by not hiring the person or by knowing what to look out for and what to work on when communicating with them. In hindsight, and now having experience doing vibe check calls for the last three hires, I understand that I’m not going to fall prey to this source of bias because I’m actively looking for people who are different than me—in life experience, ways of thinking, types of work experience, passions, etc. So if anything I’m actually more likely to not want to hire someone who is similar to me.

It’s important to take steps to remove bias in your hiring process, and it’s equally important to be conscious of how these steps are executed. In following bias-removal techniques blindly, you may risk hiring the wrong person and potentially even harming the diverse culture you aim to create.

In two (of four) cases, we didn’t end up interviewing the candidate after the test because the test did not meet our needs. I’m not sure if this was a mistake or not, but it felt disingenuous to set up calls with people when we knew that we weren’t going to hire them. In our email telling them they weren’t selected, we gave extensive feedback on the application and the test as well.

Our interviews were fairly short and allowed time to have the candidate ask questions. It was around 30 minutes to make sure they had time to think about and ask questions if they wanted to. I won’t include our interview questions here as that should probably be its own blog post in the future.

A Final Diversity Thought

In the end, the applicant we chose was another white dude. I say “another” because, while the only other “white dude” in the company right now is me, we started as three white men as co-founders. The company has become more diverse over the years but I was still very concerned about the perception of that and how it seems like we’re not hiring for diversity even though we say everywhere that we’re aiming for diversity and that it’s one of our core tenets.

I spoke to some others in the industry about this fear, specifically others who have worked on initiatives relating to diversity and equity in the games industry, and they reassured me that first of all, the fact that I’m even thinking about this and concerned about this perception is a very good sign. Second, they reassured me that if we grow more, we will naturally become more diverse because I’m always focused on this and it runs through every cultural pillar and every management practice that we have here at Clever Endeavour.

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Thank you for reading! Please share this with others if you find it might be helpful to them. Good luck on your hiring (or getting hired) journey 🙂

❤
Rich

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Bonus: Hiring Timeline

How long did it take? Not very long!

• Jan 17 — brainstorming and job description writing started
• Jan 22 — job description written and translated
• Jan 23 — job posting put up
• Jan 23 – Feb 6 —went through most applications as they came in
• Feb 6 — job posting closed
• Feb 6 — sent out emails to schedule vibe checks
• Feb 7 — did vibe checks
• Feb 8 – Feb 12 — sent test between Friday and Monday, depending on what applicants wanted
• Feb 13 — reviewed tests, sent emails to set up interviews
• Feb 14 — interviews
• Feb 14 — decided on a person
• Feb 14 — sent contract with updated information for the applicant
• Feb 15 — signed contract
• Feb 26 — employee started, could have been earlier even!