- Connor Halford (@rhythm_lynx)
General
- Be passionate
- Love games, play games, be able to talk intelligently about games
- Have an answer prepared for “what’s your favorite game and why?”
- Be honest and sincere
- Nobody expects you to be perfect, you’re a graduate
- If you say you know about something, can do something or enjoy something you’d better be able to actually talk about it. Never try and bluff something
- Be polite. You might not get the job but you’ll be in their system and if you make a good enough impression they’ll remember you for the next opening
- Apply to companies whose games you actually like and would be proud to work on
- That being said, you’re not going to work at the same studio forever and industry experience is super valuable regardless
- “You should never think that QA is below you”
- Try to work out what’s important to you. Does crunch bother you? Do you want to live in a certain area/country? How important are stability, money, company culture? Etc, etc.
- When I graduated I had two job offers (I actually had a missed call during my graduation ceremony and when I called them back it was my second offer!) and my plan had always been 3D console games at a huge studio so I went with that. I quickly realised how important to me it was to have my voice heard and to make a genuine impact on the games I work on; the reality of being a tiny cog in a big machine suddenly didn’t appeal at all. I quit after a week, went back to the other company and explained simply and honestly what had happened and why I thought I’d be a better fit there - they reopened their offer and I’ve been way happier there ever since. I should have just taken that job in the first place!
- Don’t be afraid to ask anyone for advice, they’ll be flattered and might help
- Start applying from around January / February. Junior positions are inherently low priority to fill but get hundreds of applicants, so the turnaround time on responses is painfully slow
- Know how much time you’re willing to put into job hunting vs. uni work
- Personally I would recommend focusing on uni above all else; your degree stays with you for life and if you sacrifice it to job hunt but don’t line up a job…
CVs
- Find CVs of successful students and games industry people you admire for inspiration
- Here is my CV at graduation http://codetrip.weebly.com/student-cv.html
- Here is my CV now http://codetrip.weebly.com/cv.html
- Google ‘how to write a CV’, ‘games industry CV’ etc, read lots of advice and form your own opinion. You will be able to find conflicting advice for most things - it’s your decision
- You are a student and therefore not worth more than 1 page < (opinion)
- Be strategic with what projects you include - your space is limited
- This does not mean ‘try and cram two pages of information onto one page’, it means you need to prioritize
- When I was writing my CV I went in with the mindset that I was only going to have one page. That forced me to be really selective in my projects and think about what each one said about me that others didn’t. It forces you to focus
- I selected a combination of projects that best demonstrated a broad range of specific things I wanted to show:
- Projects from uni, personal projects, game jams
- Different platforms, engines, languages
- Different types of project: research, graphics, 2D games, 3D games
- Individual work, team work
- Put your most impressive stuff first
- Make it easy for the reader to find the information they’re looking for
- First impressions count - this is yours
- Formatting is important
- Spelling is important
- Bullet points are super useful
- Get someone you trust to read it and be brutally honest; do the same for them
- Hyperlink the URL to your website to make it easy for them to go there (your CV won’t be printed out unless you get through to an interview)
- Save your CV as a PDF. It’s guaranteed to look consistent everywhere
Website
- You seriously need a portfolio website
- Find portfolios of successful students and games industry people you admire for inspiration
- Here’s mine at graduation http://codetrip.weebly.com/student-portfolio.html
- I included brief descriptions of a lot of my projects with links to find out more. You could also focus on just a few projects and explain in more detail
- Here's mine now http://codetrip.weebly.com/portfolio.html
- You could make a showreel. Probably more important for artists
- Put your most impressive stuff first
- Make it easy for the reader to find the information they’re looking for
- Don’t make them click through dozens of pages - they won’t
- Second impressions count - this is yours
- Formatting is still important
- Spelling is still important
- Bullet points are still super useful
- Nobody will read paragraphs of text. Use images and ideally videos/GIFs as much as possible
Interviews
- Prep, prep, prep
- Google ‘how to prepare for an interview’, ‘games industry interview tips’ etc, read lots of advice and form your own opinion
- Understand what the interview process for your discipline typically looks like
- e.g. if you’re a coder you will have to do a code test. Practice doing some online. Find out common questions and make sure you can answer them
- Know what a linked list is, how to make one, pros and cons, different kinds
- Brush up on your basic vector maths. Know what a dot product is and why it’s so useful
- e.g. if you’re a coder you will have to do a code test. Practice doing some online. Find out common questions and make sure you can answer them
- If you don’t know exactly how to answer a question tell them, don’t try and bluff it. Then give it your best shot. Often they don’t actually care if you get it right, they care how you approach the problem. I say this from personal experience
- Do your research. Look up a bit of company history the night before, google the names of your interviewers and stalk their LinkedIn profiles (you can go incognito if you want)
- Have questions. It looks awful if you don’t have anything to ask. Even if they’ve already answered all the questions you were going to ask, ask them to confirm or repeat something - it shows you’re engaged
Recruitment Agencies
- I personally find them very insidious but they can be undeniably helpful (can be)
- Don’t bother with generic agencies, games is too niche. Look for agencies that specialise in games such as Aardvark Swift
- Only sign up with one agency, multiple agencies will flood the same companies and cause all sorts of headaches
- Understand their business model. You don’t pay them, your employer pays them a percentage of the salary for your first year on top of paying you your full salary. E.g. if you somehow got a job earning £100,000 and the agency fee was 10% it would cost your crazy employer £110,000 to employ you the first year
- This means they’ll haggle hard on your behalf to get you the highest salary possible
- It also means they do not want you to take your dream job, they want you to take the highest paying job. If you quit and use them again, they get another finder’s fee
- The point of a recruiter is that they have contacts. They can find out about positions that aren’t even advertised yet, they can pester people to look at your application out of the pile of hundreds, they help organise interviews etc
- I was applying to big studios and not even getting replies; I was lost in the crowd
- You can’t stand out if they don’t even look
- I signed up with Aardvark Swift and immediately had interviews lined up, though most were for companies I wasn’t that interested in
- If you’re struggling to find time to look for a job while studying, they can potentially do a lot of the heavy lifting for you
- You can’t apply to companies through an agency that you’ve already applied to individually
- This is because companies could then hire you and claim the recruiter had nothing to do with it so don’t have to be paid
- This was really frustrating because I applied to several companies I really wanted to work for and never heard back from them. Then I signed up with a recruiter who had contacts there but couldn’t use them
- Know that the agency will modify your CV to remove contact information and add their own branding. I actually missed a phone interview because the agency had modified my CV without my knowledge and then neglected to give the company my phone number
- If you can, try and include your website URL in multiple places. If your entire contact section gets a logo pasted over it (standard, mine did) you want to make sure companies can still see your portfolio
- Ask the recruiter to send you a copy of your modified CV so you understand what companies are actually getting