[MUD-Dev] JOB: How to get into Game Design / Game content

[Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric]

At 02:04 PM 28/05/01 -0700, Raph Koster wrote:

> The flip side of recruiters--they effectively raise the cost of
> hiring someone, so given evenly matched candidates, a company will
> go with the one that came in without a recruiter. Similarly, because
> of that, having a recruiter contact a company where you have friends
> is bad form--you could and should have just called them directly,
> rather than costing the company extra money.

While I'm not familiar with how recruitment works in the games
industry, my checkered past includes some experience that involved
researching how recruitment works, specifically creating and
delivering programs to help people find jobs.  It's a simplification
to be sure, but there are two basic types of recruiting situations
(other type names exist, but I'll use the ones I use most often):

Contingency.  A recruiter gets paid by the hiring company if and when
it find someone to fill an opening.  The hiring company may or may not
seek to fill the position itself, and may or may not make list the
position with multiple recruiters.

Placement.  The hiring company contracts one recruitment company to
find candidates suited for a specific position.  The hiring company
usually does not seek to fill the position itself since theoretically,
the recruitment company gets paid as long as they identify qualified
candidates, even if the hiring company hires someone else, like a
person who walks in off the street. In practice, in the rare cases
where this happens, the recruiter ends up charging a reduced fee in
the interest of receiving further assignments.

In general, companies make little or no use of recruiters of either
type for entry-level or junior jobs where it's usually pretty easy to
identify candidates.

And while it's a generalization, one critical point to keep in mind is
that recruiters do not work for you, the job seeker.  They work for
the people who pay them, meaning the employers. This means they do not
go around trying to find you a job.  Instead, they focus on two other
things.  One is to build and maintain a database of people, and the
other is to find companies to give them assignments.  If you happen to
be a good fit for one of these assignments, great.  But the job seeker
is seldom if ever the starting point.

Every top-notch recruiter I know is a genuinely nice person, so I
certainly don't want to suggest that recruiters are hard-hearted, but
merely to outline the way the recruitment industry works, at least in
my experience.

Cheers.

Richard Aihoshi - "Jonric"
RPG Vault, IGN Vault Network

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