Advice on applying for a job in the games industry

Gah. Right, fed up of yet more rubbish applications turning up in my inbox. I have this up in a post on our website, but since many of the applications quite clearly show that none of the applicants are even bothering to read our website, I'll put it here instead. Maybe here it will reach any potential applicants before they decide to come to us.

I'm sure most of these points will stand you in good stead for an application to any games developer, not just us.

 

Good call. I also advocate non-generic cover letters. Most of the cover letter "examples" I see online are terrible. They show no personality and are just ridden with puffed-up buzz words. Show who you are in your cover letter. It's the games industry, not a corporate bank. In other words - have fun and show that you would be fun to work with.

 

I love a good "meshing with our organisation"s.

 

You should come and mesh with us Sabotander

 

Or if you are not a gamer show that you are passionate about solving really technically complex problems on challenging platforms. If you want to render pretty images go work in Hollywood. But if you want the change of doing it in 1/10000 of the time and on a machine that costs 1/10 of what Hollywood uses we want to hear from you.

 

I suppose that's true - it's not necessarily a passion for games that's important, so much as a passion for the things needed to make a game great. After the application last week from a woman looking for a "IT Trainer / Data Analyst / Other suitable" role though, I'm despair of even getting applications which know what games are, let alone be passionate about them. Seems like 90% of the applicants out there are just too lazy to do any research at all into the places they're applying to.

I totally didn't keep my promise to keep the post up to date either, so I added the most recent sin (lying in your cover letter) up now.

For the applicants who show the most heinous breaches of this, and clearly put no effort in at all, I've taken to simply replying with a link to the page and a list of the points on which they've failed. Hopefully the message gets across clearly.

 

The trouble is the message will never get across because eventually the person sending the CV will either get hired or give up. If they get hired then they will presume their CV is good. If they never get hired they will look for something in a different industry and so never come back to games development.

If there is a way to 'fix' this issue it needs to be done at the school level and not at the actual application level. Anyone can be taught how to write a simple CV but they need to understand this early on before they have to write their own CV.

 

So you're saying replying back to an applicant with a specific list of reasons why they weren't considered isn't getting the message across?

For any application anywhere, applicants are always welcome to ask for reasons why they weren't hired, and often they'll get a straight answer (lacking in skill X or whatever). Not that I'm saying this shouldn't be taught more in schools, just that the sort of teaching schools give is most often too generic. Every applicant and every CV is different, and I think because of that the best sort of teaching is hard, critical feedback of a CV already written, not generic advice on how to write a good CV couched in generalities.

 

7. Don't make grammatical errors when you ask others not to.

 

Meshing? What's that? Alt+dragging meshes? Is this what we call an artist these days?

I dispair.

 

Do you see my CV up there in that post, or an application to another developer? While I'm not proud of any spelling or grammer mistakes that might creep into my personal blog posts, there's a world of difference between a blog post and an application for a job. There's also a world of difference between a minor capitalisation mistake / starting a sentence with 'and', and the emails I get where people can't spell 'developer', 'software', or even the name of our company correctly (all of which I've seen).

 

I'm going to have to agree with MrCranky on this one. Grammar errors in a (supposedly) relaxed forum environment are much different than grammar errors in a job application. I would never spell cheque my forum spelling as much as I would for any applikation I send.

Edit: Though I only had 9 posts so I couldn't see the smiley faces in any previous posts

 

A year back I sent an email for a job app.. I double checked the spelling in the email, i triple checked the spelling in the resume/cover letter.

But then realised AFTER i sent it, that i spelled two words wrong in the subject!

"Aplication for advertised postion"

Doh!