Q.


WHAT HAVE BEEN THE MAIN CHALLENGES THAT RECRUITERS HAVE FACED DURING 2022?


Emma Smith, Creative Assembly: The key ongoing challenges which prevails in our industry is talent shortage and competition. This is no different in 2022. However, global issues such as the war in Ukraine, the economy, the impact of Brexit and covid-19, all increase the issue. The continued drive to hire in senior developers across the industry, coupled with a mismatch in availability of those candidates, means we are fuelling a fierce market, which is not going to abate any time soon.


Eduardo Goncalves, Keywords Studios: To combat the talent shortage, recruiters are looking to highlight their company offering, culture, values, and people insights on career websites, optimising job ads to make them more engaging and personable. This alongside hosting career events to attract and educate potential candidates. The implementation of referral programs can also be a great strategy to attract quality candidates.


By building, managing, and widening quality talent pools for future requirements, recruiters can anticipate needs and add value back into the games industry and its pool of candidates, who have already developed a positive impression of your brand and role. The candidate market has changed, and we


are no longer picking talent, talent is picking us. Improving the candidate experience is essential for successful recruitment and to build a strong company culture.


Alan Dixon, Amiqus: If the games industry is to continue growing, we need to widen the pipeline of talent. At Amiqus – and particularly via our pro bono initiative G Into Gaming – we’re working with organisations like Mastered to attract experienced programming talent (as well as those working in other disciplines) to the games industry. There is a huge pool of talent outside of games, and many in tech businesses such as Meta and Twitter which are currently seeing redundancies or turmoil who we want to encourage into a brilliant career in games.


Colin Macdonald, Games Jobs Live: This year has been a real rollercoaster for many HR departments - the first half of 2022 saw massive talent shortages as salaries rose and people felt less attached to teams they hadn’t seen much of the past few years, and vacancies in the UK’s games industry hit an all- time peak of 2,816 open roles in June. But as inflation continued to soar, the bigger studios, starting with the Sony and Microsoft owned ones, started to reduce their open vacancies over the summer, and open positions in November are the lowest they’ve been all year. Although my sense is that people are consequently a little more nervous about leaving otherwise seemingly secure jobs, so staff turnover may be lower now as well.


Kim Parker Adcock, OPMjobs: One challenge has been that according to research, 55% of candidates accept a role but keep looking. We have addressed this within our process in keeping in touch with candidates regularly during the entire process and beyond their start date. With notice period and visas it can be up to five months between acceptance and start date and warm communication in that period is essential for all parties. Counter offers from current employers have understandably been frequent. However, some of the salaries we are seeing are simply not sustainable and I worry about future redundancies as investors get anxious and the population returns to pre- covid behaviours.


“The candidate market has changed, and we are no longer picking talent, talent is picking us. Improving the candidate experience is essential for successful recruitment and to build a strong company culture”


Eduardo Goncalves, head of create talent acquisition for Keywords Studios UK/Europe


December2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 37


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