Hey folks!

Anoter leadership roundtable organized through Game Dev MTL discussed hiring and onboarding. Here are the notes that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (shared publicly with their permission).

Note that some information here may be missing the context of the in-person conversation, but I still think they can be helpful.

Roundtable 1/3: Designing & Maintaining Company Culture
Roundtable 2/3: Feedback, Reviews & 1 on 1s
Roundtable 3/3: Hiring and Onboarding

Sorting Through Applicants

Different folks at the roundtable had different ways of sorting through applicants.

There were a number of tips that came up during the roundtable, which I’ll share below:

There were a couple of additional points that came up that were worth discussing:

• ‘even if not hired, applicants evolve over many years and can be a good fit in the future’ — be sure to respond to applicants and keep contact with them in the future. Also, an important note (that we’ll get to later in this email) about not keeping their information around for over a year because of the new Bill 25.
• ‘leads might try to reject some applicants if they’re worried about their own position’ — a couple of folks brought this up, where they’ve had people dismiss what would otherwise be good applications because of their concern for their position (consciously or not!). It’s important then, as mentioned above, to make it very clear what the criteria is and make sure that enough people are reviewing applications to make sure that this gets caught if it happens.

Lastly, where do you post your jobs?

Added note—in another roundtable in 2024 someone talked about places to post jobs to seek out more diversity (especially useful in Quebec or Canada):

• https://www.guichetemplois.gc.ca/personnes-handicapees
• https://www.guichetemplois.gc.ca/embauche/nouveaux-arrivants
• https://aboriginaljobboard.ca/
• https://www.indigenouscareers.org/

Interviews

Everyone in the group did interviews or interview-like conversations. Usually there was a vibe check or a phone call with filtering questions, followed by a formal interview with the hiring manager and the leads of the department or the people who would be responsible for managing the employee.

Some notes about the process and especially about tests. Note that this was a small group and doesn’t reflect the whole industry, even in Montreal—some folks in the industry are strongly against testing during the hiring process (but those people weren’t vocal in these roundtables).

Hiring Logistics

We then moved to any sorts of tips and tricks people might have regarding the actual logistics of hiring—contracts, hardware, etc.

We talked about the importance of being well organized with a list of:

• all of the steps that take place before the person is hired (for the hiring manager)
• what we need from the new employee before they start: void cheque, information for payroll, required hardware, etc.
• employee guide which includes policies, values, processes, etc.

This content started bleeding into onboarding pretty quickly so we jumped right over to that.

Onboarding

Onboarding was the bulk of the discussion, since onboarding is so so so important. We had lots of notes that I tried to organize into categories, so hopefully they make sense to you too.

Lastly, we got into discussion about legal requirements around hiring and HR processes. There was a lot to talk about here, but there was one point about what employees are legally required to sign. See the resources section piece about Law 25. As one participant said, “mieux prévenir que guérir!” (better to prevent than to healtry to fix the problem after).

And one big sticky note which summarized a lot about issues folks had in the past about not having enough processes:

Other Miscellaneous Notes

Because you can’t always categorize everything! Note some of the legal points relate to Quebec, Canada specifically.

Resources

• Quebec Law 25 obligations
• Extremely comprehensive list of policies required by a company in Quebec — I’m not a lawyer but I believe that several of these are covered by default by Quebec’s labour laws, so even if you don’t have a policy around some things the default is what’s written in the Quebec code. But, I’m not a lawyer! This isn’t legal advice.
• Collage HR — tool which helps with gathering and sorting job applications, team members sharing and commenting on them, sending out responses, and can also handle stuff like onboarding, reviews, etc. etc.
• BitWarden — password manager and secure file sharing (also LastPass but they’re more expensive and there have been more breaches)
• http://WorkWithIndies.com — job posting for Indie jobs
• I was asked to share Clever Endeavour’s “How to Interact With Us” questions — each employee fills this out and every other employee reads theirs to know more about them and how to work with them:
  • Conditions I like to work in
  • The times / hours I like to work
  • The best ways to communicate with me
  • The ways I like to receive feedback
  • Things I need
  • Things I struggle with
  • Things I love
  • Other things to know about me

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Hope this was useful to you, I definitely learned a lot from the sessions!

❤
Rich