Results of 2017: Tanya Loktionova from VALUES VALUE about the main thing for the year

The founder and CEO of the recruiting company VALUES VALUE Tanya Loktionova (Evdokimenko) told App2Top.ru about HR trends in the CIS gaming industry.

How was 2017 for you?

This year was special for me, because I met him not as an employee, but as a newly minted business founder.

The first commercial consulting and recruiting projects began in February. At the same time, DevGAMM began to prepare the first HR stream in the CIS at a gaming conference for Moscow.

I also initiated a large salary survey of a Russian-speaking game dev. Since May, she has held or participated in several round tables with industry leaders, including representatives of CD Projekt RED, Ubisoft, Game Insight, Pixonic. She made a dozen reports in Russian and English on motivation, salaries, compensation and benefits, the role of HR in game development and hiring top specialists.

Since March, I have been releasing a selection of selected vacancies for App2Top every week. I wrote expert materials for the media and shared interesting publications in the group I created in FB for HR, recruiters and corporate PR managers. I traveled a lot, read, studied and taught.

In November, she returned to the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School for a deeper study of systemic HR management.

I think the most difficult thing this year was to decide on the name of the company. As a result, VALUES VALUE reflects my belief that the culture and values of the company are of the highest importance. And the most pleasant event of this year can be noticed by the change of my last name.

How was the year for the company?

Firstly, I can say that VALUES VALUE is successful and will only grow. We are entering the new year with a team of 7 specialists and an understanding of who will join us next year and in what month. As a result, we will grow at least twice.

Initially, our main product was conceived as consulting for gaming companies, now it is recruiting.

The vision of our client has remained unchanged. These are not companies, but employees, whose right to a comfortable job and a comfortable process of changing it, we are ready to protect, even refusing large corporate orders.

In August, we were able to formulate the company’s vision, mission, values, strategy and priorities until the end of 2018, a growth plan, and a financial model.

I am glad to share that all the goals for 2017 have been achieved. I thank all the partners whose support we have enlisted: conferences, media, services and experts. We are known and recommended to each other. So we do without advertising and can afford to refuse or put on the waiting list some customer companies or individual vacancies of current customers. At the same time, we try to help all specialists who turn to us for help, and do not refuse employment.

VALUES VALUE has closed the vacancies of CEO, Business Development Director, Producer, two Head of Office, several CFOs, and this is not to mention a number of positions in the field of game design, art and development.

What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?

I will note the purchase of Plarium and the news about the purchase of Big Fish Games by the Australian company Aristocrat. These large transactions can affect the entire CIS market, because Plarium has development centers in Kharkiv, Krasnodar, Kiev, Odessa and Lviv. The situation is similar with Big Fish, which actively invests not only in marketing, but also in the development of mobile games by teams from the CIS. Only in Kiev I know about six studios with whom Big Fish collaborates.

They reflect the growth of the industry and the scale of conferences White Nights, DevGAMM (which became independent in 2017), Kiev Games Gathering and Casual Connect, which returned to the CIS. In the product plan, I will note the crazy growth of Kefir! and Playrix.

What trends of the outgoing year would you note ?

In other interviews at the end of the year, such trends as mobile first, the successes of shooters from the CIS, as well as loot boxes in PC games were mentioned and may still be mentioned. Therefore, I suggest we talk about topics that are closer to me and the specifics of the VALUES VALUE business.

The first trend. Asian companies are paying more and more attention to our companies. They are ready to open new offices in the CIS in search of Western expertise without Western costs for salaries and office maintenance.

The second trend. There is a flow of specialists from game dev to gambling and slots, especially in Ukraine and Belarus. And how not to overflow if every self-respecting slot and casino company has already opened or is going to open its office here?

The third trend. There is a great demand for our specialists with experience in casual genres, especially three-in-a-row, from studios from Europe. So learn and improve your English, dear readers.

I will note the appearance of narrow profiles and the search for Retention & Monetization Managers, Narrative Designers, Marketing Performance Managers, UAM for a specific channel / platform, bizdevs for marketing and so on. This means that companies are not just growing, but maturing in terms of business processes and the level of organizational maturity.

I am pleased with the interest in building HR, Recruiting and Employer’s Branding processes: there is a request for advice from us or companies are willing to pay a lot of money to find such specialists in their staff.

The maturation of the market reflects both the request for personal consulting and assistance in finding a job.

Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.

I won’t be particularly new here, because “I’m a retrograde mom.” This year, Clash Royale has undergone a new birth for me with its 2×2 action game and a system of special events.

I also liked Phone Destroyer for the cool work with the brand.

Visually, I liked Shadow Fight 3.

New three-in-a-row this year did not come to me, I continue to play Soda Saga, Jelly Saga every day, less often — Gardenscapes. My friends and clients have projects at the beta stage, I’m looking forward to their releases, but I can’t talk about them yet.