Why algorithms let down good potential employees and how I intend to instead
promote myself?
This week I have been looking at optimizing how I present myself and my work to the world. I have also been thinking about how I can improve my own personal branding.
My preference and why:
What I instead found was not something I particularly liked. I found that the best way to get noticed was to game algorithm, entirely taking out the person from the equation. Frankly, I hate this. You’re not hiring a machine, you’re hiring a person, and skills can ultimately be taught. Finding an employee that will mesh well
with the team is important as it will have an effect on not just the new hire, but the entire team.
Feelings:
Having had to look for new hires myself, I noticed that there are two kinds of hires I would be looking for. With this experience, I can tailor my own branding for the type of role I want.
The first type of hire was an expert, someone who you would want to come in without hassle and do their job to a high standard. They need to be experienced, skilled, and able to bring themselves up to speed as quickly as possible. This type of hire benefits from being able to quickly learn existing architecture and is intended to come in, do their work, and then move on.
The second was a more permanent team member, these would be looking to improve all the time, a team member who is intended to learn what becomes newly needed, who was not expected to know everything but would be expected to figure out what is needed to finish their tasks. We want to invest in this employee and we create well-rounded permanent team members. This employee would be ideally versatile, hard-working, and dedicated to the team or project.
There are times when each type of employee is needed, but whenever I have had to find a new hire, I am looking for either specific skills and past projects that match those skills, or I am looking for a person who I think can learn that I think will get on well with the team. And sadly, people seem to forget to mention a lot on their CVs.
This comes back to algorithms. an algorithm may have no issue searching by certain words or topics but if
everyone is searching with an algorithm, they lose the personal touch. Not to mention that people can lie to appeal to an algorithm and a good employee will not be lying on the application.
Finally, in my opinion, there should really be no reason to tailor a CV to a job anyway. Gone are the days where people stay at one company their whole lives, this makes having a CV ready on short notice more important. But if people would focus their CV’s on generic past work and skills instead of tailoring them for each application, and putting more of a focus on the cover letter, then not only would it be easier to search for a qualified employee but also easier to understand the employee’s history.
By splitting the skills from the person, the hiring party can get a much better idea of who the candidate really is, better understanding all skills, background, and personality, instead of having candidates aimlessly trying to please an algorithm and diluting how the CV sells the candidate. Another change to focusing on generic CVs and personality-filled cover letters is that it would become the responsibility of the hiring party to filter
applications instead of putting the task onto the candidates. Most of the candidates won’t be hired anyway so why put them through an arduous task instead of respecting their time.
An evaluation of the state of hiring practices in games:
I do see the need to quickly filter candidates in an industry that a lot of people want to work in. It’s just that larger companies hire people whose job it should be to do that, and they automate to make it easier.
So looking at the issues from a hopeful employee’s perspective. There only seem to be only a few ways to get a job in games. You can apply to a company and hope for the best, pass their tests and when you do meet people, make a good impression. If you get that far, a tip you can use to trick algorithms is to optimize your CV for them. Adding hidden text in the background color including the job description that cannot be seen but is read by a computer for example.
The second way is to be known as an expert in an area and get approached by a company (or recruiter). If I wanted to focus on this route, I would need a good portfolio and promote myself online, become desirable for the company to hire. This is hard for those not already in the industry. I find this way is much better as the hirer already knows the candidate and can focus on if they fit the team.
Finally, the last way I have found is the way I believe most people get their chances. They already know someone in the industry and that person advises their company about their skills and that they would be a good fit. Not good for a lot of people but it can get great employees that will fit right into a team without too much effort. As a hirer, this is what we try to look at first, who knows someone who may be able to join us, usually with a specific skill set as well.
According to Fábio et al, “Some postmortems describe problems in team building, problems that caused communication and relationship difficulties” (Petrillo, Pimenta, Trindade and Dietrich, 2009). I believe a lot of these relationship problems among a team can be solved by hiring the right people, something that algorithms that focus on keywords fail at entirely by making people try to appear how they are not.
People will change what they present to appeal to an algorithm, even if a company is not using one and by doing that, they are not presenting themselves accurately, just a version for that particular job.
The other side to this is also discussed by Fábio et al. A quote suggests that during the development of SpecOps: Rangers Lead the Way, the team struggled to hire both coders and artists, and development was delayed. “The last thing that I expected was that it would be hard to find good programmers in Seattle. I was hired at the start of SpecOps’ development and didn’t manage to bring the entire programming staff on board for nearly seven months. Needless to say, this caused substantial delays. We had similar problems hiring the art team ”(Postmortem: Zombie’s SpecOps: Rangers Lead the Way, 2021).
Perhaps this was due to a faulty hiring process, but the result was the rest of the team getting burned out trying to cover for a team too small. Eventually, the art leads left the company causing a need for even more
hiring. Something that could potentially be avoided by hiring more personally. This could have a side effect of reducing costs by having the right people on the team. Better team, better product, less wasted time.
Self-Crit
What I did
This week, I looked at how I want to present myself. I have little interest in a new job at the moment as I am happy where I am. What I would like however is to prepare for my future. I would like to be self-sustaining from my work and I think a good way to achieve this would be to create a business with specific targets.
This business’ core pillar would be to provide for the team, to ensure we can continue to make good games, and most importantly to let the team grow. I would focus on the team as the team is the business, I like working with my friends and enjoy it, so why not set the goal of trying to do that forever.
I also took a look at my very outdated forward-facing media, It’s far past time to update. So I have set myself several goals to help improve my forward-facing branding
What went wrong
These goals are long-term goals, so there’s not much to do right now, first I will need a product to work on, and I have future units of my masters to look into that. So not much can go wrong just yet. One potential issue I have always had is presenting and selling myself. I find if I work to my best, people don’t appreciate quite what I can be capable of.
How can I overcame what went wrong
So I have a solution. Instead of selling myself, I will focus on my projects and remain faceless myself where possible. I want to create a set of branding that represents me without actually focusing on myself. The
projects will instead lead the way and be set atop the podium I choose to present to the world.
It’s not that I won’t appear publicly at all, just that I will not be the focus. I will gain infamy through my work and focus on improving that work as much as possible. It is said that Pink Floyd played their first gigs in the dark because they wanted to focus on the music. In the same sense, I want to focus on the games
I make. Not that my name won’t be all over my work like a Hideo Kojima Production, however.
What can I improve and how
I have learned that I need to create branding and update my LinkedIn, something I don’t really use too much at the moment.
I have for a while now had some theories on branding involving IP. I have wanted to expand on this topic in a blog post for a while now so as soon as I have time I will do the required research and write it up, even if it passes the unit’s deadline date.
This following week will also involve creating a video summing up the past weeks, I intended to reference this and several other previous blog posts in the video as they cover a lot of topics important to me.
Action Plan
- Update LinkedIn Profile as part of personal branding for my next released project
- Create Consistant Branding for the next project
Conclusion
Hiring is currently too impersonal and I believe it would be better for everyone if we shifted towards a more personal method of hiring. I want to attempt to fix this for myself but don’t expect to change an industry at all.
I have experienced both sides of the hiring process and learned more from hiring than applying. I have looked at how I appear as a candidate and reviewed what I would change. I then decided that it was frankly stupid to be preparing myself for employment to a company that would not care about me personally. At this time I have no want or need to be applying for jobs to be a nameless employee at a company that does not care about me. Instead, I have decided to forge my own path, one that will let me continue to work with friends, that I will be happy with.
All that awaits is to see how I will manage this monumental task. So I will create personal branding for myself with my projects at the core, with the intent to disrupt some stale norms and hopefully create something larger than myself that will stand the tests of time. Or, I will fail spectacularly, I guess we will have to wait and see.
Bibliography
Petrillo, F., Pimenta, M., Trindade, F. and Dietrich, C., 2009. What went wrong? A survey of problems in game development. Computers in Entertainment, 7(1), pp.1-22.
Gamasutra.com. 2021. Postmortem: Zombie’s SpecOps: Rangers Lead the Way. [online] Available at: [Accessed 19 August 2021]