Results of 2021: Tanya Loktionova from Values Value about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Tanya Loktionova, the founder of Values Value.

How did 2021 go for the company?

The Values Value strategy in the outgoing year was based on three pillars: speed, quality and development. We improved processes, requested feedback, studied a lot, introduced market analytics as a standard for each new vacancy for clients.

We started 2021 as a part of four partners and co-owners, as a result – record revenue, and net profit is four times higher than 2020. In the new year, two more employees will become partners: Valeria Bakhvalova, Head of Sourcing, and Alexandra Kononenko, Recruitment Lead.

It was great to come back to offline conferences and immediately set records for the number of job ads on the walls.

Back in the past year, we thought and talked a lot about ethics in game development, discrimination and ageism. We collected more than 2,400 questionnaires in our “Big Salary Survey” of Game Dev. It has been a busy and successful year, but we are glad that it is over.

What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?

The main trend in game dev recruitment has become an ever-increasing demand for employees.

The number of investments and investment funds is growing, more and more mergers and acquisitions are being announced, including Acqui-hiring, when a company is bought for the purpose of hiring its employees, rather than acquiring intellectual property or a user base.

New publishers are appearing, and hyperkezhual is maturing and the development of casual and midcore projects is starting.

Western and Asian companies continue to establish studios in the CIS and Ukraine, the remote has opened up the opportunity to hire our guys without a relocate, and the relocate to Europe has come to life after the covid shock.

If we add here the stable success of local companies and teams, then we can imagine the scale of hunting, rehunting and hiring in general.

As a result, recruiters have become “new producers”, their demand and salaries have greatly increased. For all five years of Values Value’s existence, we have been encouraging game development companies to value their recruiters and HR, develop them and transfer them to a strategic level. This judgment day has come.

It has also become more difficult for us to hire and retain Values Value employees. We make a big bet on finding emerging talents and their consistent development, and not just hiring established professionals. Our managers have powerful expertise, training skills, and they have so established an onboarding and adaptation system that even a pharmacist has become a promising recruiter.

Also, my partners and I have significantly revised the structure of the fee in the team: we have increased a fixed part without noticeable changes in bonuses for closing vacancies, introduced monthly individual and team bonuses, as well as quarterly bonuses based on the results of the entire company. We also began to participate more willingly in courses for recruiters and providers, conferences and HR-related events without reference to the game meeting.

We see an ever-increasing demand among customers, when customers are already thinking how to be a better, more priority company for us. This plus an understandable increase in cost allows us to continue to raise prices for Values Value services.

What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?

We will hone processes, improve quality and invest more and more resources in the development of employees and the team as a whole.

We plan to develop a subscription format for working with clients, which we tested this year. We plan to roll out of the secret mode of salary market analytics services and continue to build this direction.

Over the past year, we have almost completely switched to hiring professionals at the Lead, Expert, C-level level, and the process of selecting such specialists is longer. The average term for closing a vacancy this year has grown to 47 days, and we are aiming for a challenge – to stay within the 40 working days allocated for lower-level vacancies.

The Values Value communication strategy is also changing, if earlier our target audience was client companies, now it will be recruiters and HR. All for the sake of hiring and retaining “new producers”.