Ah, the hiring process. Exciting, tiring, and fun. I thought I would share my experience of this round of hiring in the hopes that readers might get inspired or learn something. The process is very far from perfect, and I'd be curious to hear any thoughts or improvements in the comments section that might help readers as well. I'll talk about what we did differently in hiring this time around, the selection process, biases, interviews, tests, responding to candidates, and tips for employees applying for jobs (if that's the only thing that interests you, skip to the bottom!).
Let's go.
We just went through the hiring process again, this time to hire a new community manager at Clever Endeavour Games, as Geneviève (our current one) is moving into a production and marketing manager role. She helped tremendously in this hiring process, and while she had a big part in the process, this post is meant to reflect my learnings throughout the process, not her learnings or the learnings of Clever Endeavour Games as a whole.
The job description was written to be as fair as possible and attract as many qualified people as possible, especially ones who are members of communities that are marginalized in the game development sphere. This is in line with our recent commitment to fighting for change in the industry, and it led to some changes compared to our last hiring round:
Writing a job description that was open to people who had volunteer experience and not only professional experience
Explicitly stating our intention: "We welcome applicants from a variety of backgrounds and levels of experience, and are ready to dedicate the necessary amount of time to onboarding as needed. We recognize that members of marginalized communities often face challenges when it comes to gaining experience in the gaming industry, and we want to make our hiring process as equitable as possible."
Moving several things from "requirements" to "assets"—many of the things we thought were hard requirements initially could be learned fairly easily upon further inspection
Reiterating at the end of the "assets" section that candidates should "Please remember that a job description is a starting point and not the end of the line—even if you don’t tick off all the boxes above, we highly encourage you to apply"
Running the posting by a diversity consultant who helped us to refine our wording and make some of the above changes
The result? We had more applicants that were women and/or members of BIPOC communities than ever before. We were also really, really impressed with the applications that we received. But was that because of the nature of the job itself or because of the job description? Hard to say, but we'll craft our job descriptions carefully going forward in hopes that the wording had some causal effect on the diversity of the applicant profiles we received.
Selection Process
Of the 65+ applications, only a small handful had no related experience or cover letter, and at least 25 passed a 'first look' round. My method for looking through these applications was to actually start ranking them as I read them. I put my notes about candidate A on a page, then the notes about the next application went either above or below that first person. I continued that process until I had my ordered list of 65+ applications, and after a second look there were very few changes to be made to that order. It would have been impossible to do them all and then try to sort through them afterwards!
Our hiring committee was made up of me, the current community manager, and another co-founder who handles some HR with me. It was important to have this committee to try to mitigate some of the biases which I'll talk about in the next section. We discussed our top picks and narrowed it down to a top 14 list, and ended up choosing 7 people to interview and test. It's worth noting that each of our top 10 lists were vastly different from one another, which is more proof that a hiring committee is a good idea.
Biases and potential questions to ask yourself as employer
In trying my best to not be biased, I became acutely aware of all of the biases that inevitably come up when reading through applications. I'll talk through a couple of things that went through my mind, but I certainly won't claim to have "solutions" to these. Hopefully sharing them here will help make people aware of biases they weren't aware of, or give them inspiration to think about how to do better in their evaluations.
Years ago, I learned about research that suggests that "white" names receive more interview callbacks than other names (compared to African American and Asian names according to this study). A blind hiring process involves removing any information from candidates' applications which are not essential to the job (including names). While we didn't use this process (and admit that there could be bias that crept in because of it), a blind hiring process can help with this. There are some suggestions of tools or ways to do it in this article from GlassDoor, and we may consider a tool suggested there in the future. To be perfectly honest, I didn't realize these tools were as accessible as they seem to be when we went through this hiring process.
Another bias I recognized was when I caught myself thinking about the tiny, seemingly insignificant icon next to people's email account in Gmail. Did a picture help the candidate favourability, or harm them? Does an image of something non-human—say, a colourful abstract picture, help or hinder? I found myself liking to see the person's face, even though the image is something like 20 pixels wide and can't be seen any larger. I found that in cases where there was no picture at all, the person seemed mysterious to me, like they were hiding something. If they had an abstract picture or a picture of a character from a movie or show, I found it more personable. When someone had a cartoon picture of themselves, that gave an even closer feeling but still not as human as an actual picture.
But then that got me thinking, how much does physical attractiveness come into play? We've all heard studies about physical attractiveness leading to bias in hiring, but does this come into the equation in a place as inconspicuous as the tiny email icon? I like to think not, and I think learning that this bias exists and recognizing it is the first step toward fighting it. So then the question for job-seekers would be: is it better to put your face or not put your face in that picture?
On a similar note, pictures on resumes generally seem to be discouraged in 2021—many sources say that having one is a bad idea (JobScan blog, Workopolis blog, and others) and that some employers won't even consider applicants with a picture on their CV. However, a study from the Society for Human Resource Management suggests that a lot of recruitment is done with the help of social media, and some job sites suggest that not having a photo or presence online can be a turnoff to employers. In our case, since the role we were looking for is social media, most applicants shared their social media profiles up front and encouraged us to look at them. This makes the idea of blind interviewing nearly impossible, even if it is the fairest method. In the future, for roles that are different from this one, we might try to employ a more blind process at least for the early stages.
We had applicants from a very wide range of educational backgrounds, possibly due to the nature of the job, possibly because of the wording of the job posting, and possibly due to chance. I started to wonder how much I value—or how much any employer values—different degrees, and where that value comes from. I believe that people have some sort of degree hierarchy in their minds, perhaps based on prestige, competitiveness of the programs, salary of jobs in that field of work, what their parents did for work, etc. And what about no university degree at all? There's also individual bias related to particular interests—as someone who is more interested in music composition than history, maybe I'm more likely to think favourably about a music grad than a history grad. In this case, the university degrees were examined more closely if there was little or no job experience, or no samples of work. Generally, I used this as a guide to applicants' secondary skills. In general, this degree bias is something that we all need to try to check at the door before walking into the room of applicants—again, a blind process can help with this, but so can consciously not ranking one candidate higher than the other based on their degree or where they got it.
There is a positive side to seeing this great variety in degrees though, as it got me thinking about secondary skills that we might be lacking in the studio. We're a very small studio (7 people, with this new hire), and if someone has a music background or a writing background or a graphic design background, this could be extremely valuable as it fills some skill holes in our team. That said, if the hire would actually rather develop their secondary skill, you may find them unhappy to be working in the job you actually hired them for. This discussion was brought up within the team and actually acted as a window into a larger question of whether the company should be aiming for more specialized employees or more jack-of-all-trades employees. I'll spare you the details of that conversation, but there is no right answer to this, only preference!
Interviews
We finally whittled the list down to seven candidates who we wanted to interview and administer a test (that we referred to as a writing exercise to take some of the edge off).
To reduce bias and give everyone an equal chance at success, the questions were the same and were asked in the same order for every candidate. There's plenty of data on why informal interviews aren't ideal, so I won't touch that here. We ran our interview questions by the diversity consultant to see if there were any improvements to be made. I'll list some of the questions here which I had thoughts about, and share those thoughts in italics. If anyone is curious about the whole interview question list, let me know and I can share that too.
Introduce ourselves and what we do on the team, explain formality of interview and why
↑ This came about because our most recent hire had told us that the process seemed very formal while our every day interactions were very informal, and it was a bit jarring. We wanted to clarify that and explain why it's important to give every candidate the same questions in the same order.
Describe the way we work—who does what, how often we talk, our meetings, etc.
↑ This was a bit odd to throw in right in the middle of the interview. The idea was that we wanted to explain how we're quite democratic but we still have a structure where specific people make specific decisions, and see if there were culture questions that came up. In reality, this explanation was mostly met with silence or some comment of "oh that sounds great" (whether the candidates actually believed that or just said it to be polite and fill the space I'm not sure...).
Do you have a favorite content creator in games?
↑ This was a great question for a community manager who will be doing marketing and outreach work. It was clear to us who had a good handle on the streamer ecosystem and some candidates even gave examples of streamers / content creators that they liked because of their values and community, which tied in perfectly with the values we tried to put forward on the job posting itself.
Can you tell us more about yourself, any fun facts or interests that you want to share?
↑ This was one of my favourite questions because we finally got to see (for most candidates) how they speak and act when they're no longer nervous about doing an interview. That said, this leads dangerously into the realm of informal interviews, which is both why it's natural for me to like it but also why it's an easy trap to fall into that we restricted to only the last few questions.
Of course, as in all things hiring, there are a plethora of biases that pop up in interviews. I'll list a few here.
A candidate might share common interests with you—growing up in the same city, sports you both play, having the same favourite video games as a child, etc. and this might affect how much you connect with them. A hiring committee should help with this.
The order and scheduling of interviews may affect your judgment as well—are you more likely to pick the last candidate because their interview is freshest in your mind, or least likely because you're tired of interviews already? Are you more likely to pick the first one because you're constantly going back to them as the marker of what a candidate needs to beat to get through, and recalling the interview with them enough times that it becomes familiar? Or is the first one the least likely because it's the farthest back in your memory? I don't see any way around this, except to maybe make sure not to schedule all of your interviews back-to-back, which will surely tire you out by the time you reach the last few candidates.
How does the time of the interview affect your feeling about the candidate? While the study suggesting that judges give harsher sentences when hungry may have some correlation-implies-causation issues, there may still be something to the fact that we act and differently in the morning, in the afternoon, when hungry, when tired, etc.
How much does the composition or quality in video calls affect your judgment of the candidate (probably unconsciously)?
