Just in four years. And you've got to learn about every single team in such a level of detail. I feel like I do get to know how much is going on in development. We have to work out who needs what and where the priorities lie. It's been really interesting to learn all of those different things. You do feel part of the teams as well, because they bring you into their development cycles and pipelines too.
TL;DRHiring is prioritised from critical down to not critical, with many critical roles at once, so the recruiting team keeps syncing with directors and execs to pick its battles, and the team has grown to seven.
Yeah. So I get a list of priorities and how we prioritise roles, and it goes critical, very high, high and all the way down to not critical. But you'll have like 20, 30 critical roles to look at at once, and you just have to divide your time and speak to all the directors or the execs to align what is actually critical and important. And it's just continuous communication and syncing to ensure that. But like you say, you do have to just pick your battles and work out what the right thing to target is, and grow the team. The team's grown over that time as well. So when I started, there was just myself and a coordinator, but now I have a team of seven, including myself. So it means we can support more areas and give a better service to all of the teams as well.
Yeah, it sits under the HR bracket, but we are our own department as well. So we're there purely to support recruitment and talent development and hiring and strategy.
Let's start with the entry-level, no-experience individuals. I think what you really need to see is that passion that wants to work in the industry and that drive, and for us, that's really important. I think understanding the challenges and complexities, but having that passion behind it, is really important. I think a lot of the work that we do here is so groundbreaking, exciting, so different. To have that kind of mentality and attitude is really important. So for us, that's key. But then alongside it, obviously not every department needs a portfolio, but if they do, the portfolio is key. So you don't necessarily need to have a degree or do a course, but your portfolio is really important. Whether you're an artist, designer, programmer, whatever, that's key for us to get insight into your personal ability.
TL;DRArtists should show polished, photorealistic hard-surface or sci-fi work, designers should show MMO and multiplayer awareness, and programmers should present easy-to-read portfolios, often a small game with short videos, since every portfolio is reviewed.
So if you are an artist, we'd love to see hard surface stuff or some sci-fi, not necessarily sci-fi, but it's really important to have that there. The photorealism is really key, but just well polished and targeted to us, for artists. Designers, it depends on the kind of design work that you do, whether you do systems or level, etc. You don't have to tailor it necessarily to Star Citizen, but just having an idea of MMOs and multiplayer work is really important, unless you go down the combat route as well. And programmers, just really well laid out programming portfolios, easy for the directors to look at your portfolio and understand your experience simply, rather than over-complicating it, because we do view every single portfolio that applies, and that takes time. So the easier it is to view it, the better chance you have, essentially.
It's usually a small game that they've programmed and just short YouTube videos, and they'd say what they've done on that project. That's the normal thing.
TL;DRApplications are all reviewed manually, followed by a qualifying call, a roughly 30-minute hiring manager interview, a role-specific test, and usually an on-site interview, with over 25,000 applications received last year.
So typically someone applies and then my team reviews it. My team reviews every single application that comes through for all the roles that we have. Last year we had over 25,000 applications. So we went through them all manually, which is good, but obviously time consuming. And then we review them, share them with managers. They give us insight or ask us to ask those candidates some questions. And then we have a qualifying call with the candidate to understand more about their motivations, what they're interested in, expectations, and just cover off the usual questions. Then, if that all aligns, an interview with the hiring manager, normally 30 minutes, and then depending on the role, a test of some type: programming test, art test, etc. And then usually, now we're back after COVID, an on-site interview to meet the team, see the studio they could be working in, and then hopefully some success after.
I'll get back to you. It's difficult. We do try to respond to everyone, but with the sheer volume, it is basically impossible. We'd love to give personalized feedback to every single person, but again, it's like that priority thing. We have to deal with the people that we can move forward with. I always recommend trying to go to career advice sessions and stuff. We've done them in the past, normally with local universities, and we're trying to do more. But the general advice is there.
Yeah, we try to go to as many as possible each year. The pandemic obviously stalled quite a lot, but we did some virtual ones. We go to universities locally, and we're trying to do more as we expand the team. We go to Develop in Brighton, EGX we've been to before, Devcom in Cologne, Digital Dragons in Poland. We're hopefully going to go to Digital Dragons again this year, and then different universities in the US, and we're working with some more schools in Germany too. So we're just slowly expanding and reaching as much as possible. GDC maybe one year.
It's all part of our long-term growth plan. We're not going to always hire experienced people. We need to look long-term as well, at how we can bring talent to the industry. We're actually working with some schools to help design their curriculum, so then they're more aligned to what we look for as well. That's just one angle, but we're also looking at working with more training programs and institutions, with Matt, if he was here, but he's not. And working out how we can establish a better route to industry as well, to increase diversity.
TL;DRVideo outreach and the game's greater visibility and stability have helped hiring positively, and he has heard no negative reactions from candidates, though he says he wouldn't tell anyway.
I actually think definitely positively. I think more recently, very positively. I think with Star Citizen getting more visibility and the game being more stable and having more content, it's definitely helped, because people are knowing about the game. When people want to work in the industry, they'll know the big AAA studios or the studios that they're aware of. Our name is becoming more available and more visible, and I think it's definitely helped us attract more people that way. I think people viewing your content has helped for sure, because they get more insight into the project as well. And I mentioned to you quite recently that I'd like to do some more video stuff anyway with devs on hiring, more specifically.
I've always been curious, and since you were here, I figured I would ask whether there's ever been that inverse, whether somebody was going to join and then watched this thing on tractor beams with a burger beam that went into somebody's mouth and thought, I don't really think this is a very serious place, and I don't want to be here.
It didn't really exist before I was here. We managed it through HR and it was another part of their role. It actually started as the recruitment department. I rebranded it to talent acquisition. I won't bore you with why we did that. It's not very interesting.