Results 2020: Marina Lopatina from Talents In Games about the main thing for the year

Marina Lopatina, Head of the Talents In Games service (WN Media Group), spoke about the results of the year in the field of recruiting and working with employees.

Marina Lopatina

How was 2020 for the service?

The year has been very busy for Talents In Games. I will focus on the milestones that are central to us.

During this year, about 1,000 vacancies were posted on the platform, and the candidate base grew to 20,000 people.

Before the pandemic, we held HR meetings of gaming companies offline. The format was very popular. For example, at the beginning of the year, one of these meetings was held in St. Petersburg — an HR breakfast. HR-s from 16 companies and 5 cities came specially to it.

The global lockdown has made its own adjustments. I had to switch to online. This allowed us to meet more often. As a result, we managed to hold 11 online meetups. At them, HR-s of the game owners discussed topical issues, exchanged experiences, and asked each other for advice. In total, more than 90 HR specialists participated in such meetings.

We held the first HR conference for the HR industry in the spring, the HR Conference, and in the fall we presented the HR Merit award, the Game Dev HR Awards.

One of our areas is research on current topics. Some had to be carried out promptly — it was important to find out the results as soon as possible. In this way, we sought to help companies understand what is happening in the labor market. Among them:

"How self-isolation affected the work processes in game development";
"Reasons for changing jobs in the gaming industry";
"The pros and cons of quarantine existence."

We are currently conducting a study on salaries in game development, in which you can participate.

This year, training structures began to contact us regularly for partnership. So today we cooperate with online and offline schools and other educational institutions that teach the professions of game dev.

Within the framework of these partnerships, we regularly speak about employment, give advice on upgrading professional skills and try to be a source of vacancies for their students.

Among our partners: Skillbox, Netology, GeekBrains, HSE and many others.

Our recruitment field is developing very actively. We work with well-known companies, for which we are recruiting today.

What new trends in your niche (gaming HR) do you consider worth paying attention to?

The main trend of this year is determined by COVID19 and widespread self-isolation. A lot of companies have switched to a remote work format. This forced them to rebuild a large number of processes.

Now I will try to reveal in detail.

How has the widespread lockdown affected employees and candidates?

There is a way for hiring and employment in the regions without the difficulties of relocation;
some employees began to return to the regions from the capitals (it is cheaper to work from home in their city than, for example, in Moscow; this is a big saving on renting housing, expenses in a big city);
it has become more difficult for entry-level candidates to find a job, since stronger candidates from other IT areas have entered the market (for example, when searching for a project manager or marketer, companies primarily evaluate strong professional skills, experience in game development is an additional, but not a priority factor for them);
internships have almost completely disappeared: the employer does not have the opportunity to allocate employees for mentoring (only a few companies were able to take up training interns online).

Personal observation: at the beginning of the pandemic, candidates found it difficult to decide on a job change, preferring to "sit out" a difficult period. When it became clear that everything would not be limited to a couple of months, they organically joined the online job search.

What did the pandemic entail for employers?

For the most part, companies have rebuilt the entire hiring process;
many began to strengthen HR departments, as the number of tasks increased dramatically (the introduction of new procedures for adaptation, training, mentoring, online recruiting, and after the spring, gaming companies began to actively expand, actively recruiting employees from other IT sectors, and even open offices);
those employers who previously doubted or were even categorically against remote work have adopted this format and are satisfied that they can search in different parts of the world.

I also consider the development of online education and online conferences to be an important trend (they are at their best now: a lot of cool and useful content). And there is a demand for this: as part of one of our studies, it turned out that 70% of respondents want to get additional education in their field.

However, the development of the sector has led to the fact that a lot of empty or completely untested, harmful content has appeared on it.

What will be the bet on when developing the service in 2021?

We will continue to grow the team, develop all areas and keep our finger on the pulse.

The goal is to improve our results on the platform, continue to hold regular meetings of HR specialists, increase the number of partnerships and collaborations, opening up new opportunities and directions.

What new trends in the gaming market as a whole would you note?

That's what I noted for myself:

the growth of the gaming audience (the self-isolation period greatly contributed to more hours played);
revenue growth of gaming companies at a time when many areas suffered unexpected losses;
investments, acquisitions (the market is consolidating, among other things, due to the increasing interest in the games of those investors who previously considered it too risky).

What game releases are you interested in this year? What kind of attention did you pay specifically as a gamer?

As a child, I grew up with my brothers and spent hours playing the console (Mortal Kombat, Need for Speed, Resident Evil and hundreds of hours of Crash Bandicoot).

Now I prefer mostly mobile games. I have over a thousand Homescapes levels, and after many levels in Seekers Notes, I find myself looking everywhere for secret signs and, seeing a mysterious spot on the car in front, I think I've found a lion.

This year, the favorites of the new products are Grand Hotel Mania from Deus Kraft and Manor Matters from Playrix.