Optimizing Recruitment in Games: Why You Should Hire An Agency

Optimizing recruitment in games industry doesn’t mean cutting salaries, laying off team members, or reducing benefits. Instead, it’s about enhancing hiring processes to ensure efficiency without compromising on the value offered to employees. Effective optimization should focus on streamlining operations and improving the quality of hires. And we know that collaborating with a recruitment agency can significantly enhance your efforts. Here’s how partnering with a specialist agency can make a substantial difference:

1. Stop Guessing The Numbers, Know Them:

Recruitment agencies bring a wealth of industry-specific data that’s crucial for your studio to remain competitive. By conducting detailed market analysis and customized salary benchmarking, they equip you with the insights needed to offer attractive compensation packages. This means you’re not just guessing what to offer. It’s all about informed decisions that align with current games industry trends, ensuring you attract the best talent.

At 8Bit, we conduct the “Gamedev Salary Pulse” – an annual global salary survey complemented by a detailed report that not only reflects survey findings but also includes data from the placements we’ve successfully made throughout the year. For game studios interested in a more focused analysis, we offer sector-specific checks. This service provides detailed salary ranges for specific roles, areas, and regions, tailored by studio size and platform, ensuring your offers are always competitive and relevant.

2. Safeguarding Your Brand While Optimizing Job Offers

Teaming up with a recruitment agency offers a strategic advantage in testing how your job offers are perceived by potential candidates, all while protecting your brand’s reputation.

The first line of insight comes from the agency itself. With their expertise and understanding of the broader market, they can immediately identify any red flags or areas of concern in your offer. This initial filter ensures that only competitive and appealing aspects of your offer are highlighted.

The second level of insight is gathered discreetly through candidate interactions. As the agency conducts interviews and engages with potential hires on your behalf, they can anonymously collect candid feedback about your offer. This process is done without exposing your brand directly, allowing you to gain honest insights into how your offer is perceived.

This dual-filter approach not only ensures that your offer is aligned with market expectations but also helps you refine your proposition based on direct feedback from the job market, all without risking your brand’s reputation.

3. Optimizing Recruitment in Games Industry = Optimizing Costs:

At first glance, outsourcing recruitment might seem expensive, a perception rooted in the era when success fee models dominated the scene. However, with the emergence of alternative business models, collaborating with a recruitment agency can actually be more cost-effective. For game studios, especially indie ones planning to scale up without an internal HR team, opting for Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a budget-friendly solution. With a fixed fee, they receive comprehensive support capable of building efficient recruitment processes from the ground up.

Meanwhile, studios with established in-house talent teams can benefit from models based on fixed flat fees, like the Subscription model, offering predictable costs and streamlined hiring operations.

In the vast majority of cases, both the RPO and Subscription solutions prove to be more budget-friendly in the long run compared to expanding internal hiring teams. One crucial resource that recruitment agencies save you is time. They are operational from day one, eliminating the need for notice periods, onboarding, and training that new internal hires would typically require. Typically, all that’s needed to get started is probably just an hour-long introductory call with the hiring managers.

Additionally, recruitment agencies won’t require a salary during periods when you aren’t actively hiring. You can simply pause the partnership and re-engage the agency when it’s time to expand your team again. This flexibility helps manage costs effectively and ensures that you’re only investing in recruitment when it’s truly needed.

4. Efficient Talent Sourcing and Job Advertising:

When it comes to getting the word out about your job openings, recruitment agencies have it covered. They use their deep industry knowledge to ensure your job descriptions and salary packages really match up with market expectations. Plus, they’ve already got access to all the essential job boards and LinkedIn ads, so promoting your position is quick and reaches a wide audience right away. Agencies come with a rich database of potential candidates – often already connected to roles similar to what you’re looking for – and their established social media followings (btw. make sure to follow 8Bit Recruitment on LinkedIn) mean your openings get noticed by the right people immediately.

This setup not only speeds up the hiring process but also attracts high-quality candidates efficiently, making your recruitment efforts as effective as possible.

Optimizing Recruitment in Games Industry Takeaways

Optimizing recruitment in the games industry is crucial right now, as the field is pretty turbulent. By using the tips we’ve shared – like tapping into the resources of recruitment agencies for their vast candidate databases, cost optimization, and data-driven decision making – you can really streamline how you hire. These strategies aren’t just about filling positions faster. They’re also about making sure you offer competitive and market-aligned compensation packages to attract and keep top talent.