Lack of talent as a barrier for growth
“It’s been common knowledge for a while now that there is a huge lack of talent in the game industry, that will not be satisfied by moving a person from company A to company B within the Finnish game industry. The universities are also not generating enough graduates to solve this problem. This is why we at Finnish Game Day decided to start doing small-scale recruitment events last year, taking Finnish game companies with us to places like St. Petersburg and Kiev to meet local talent.”, recalls Kim Bäckroos, CEO of the newly formed We Got Talent Oy, managing the Games Factory Talents brand.
“However, we soon realized that out of the hundreds of professionals attending our events we were only helping the handful that were recruited by the participating companies. This is when we decided to start interviewing the developers ourselves, and commit to helping them find a position in the Finnish game industry. Bringing in new talent was also the thing that caught Helsinki-based game hub Games Factory’s ear, and this is how Games Factory Talents got started”, Bäckroos adds.
Both a talent board and a job board
Seeing the talent as an equally important customer as the hiring companies, Games Factory Talents decided that they wanted to build a community of developers and to showcase this community to the companies looking for new talent.
“Instead of building a platform only for the job seekers, we wanted to build something that would attract the companies to come visit our site in search for talent. Our goal was to have a way to present our talent to companies, before the company has to start the long and expensive journey of advertising an open job position.” say Bäckroos.
This is how the Talent Board got started. The Talent Board was published on the 10th of September 2018, the day before Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki. The Talent Board features a variety of available game industry professionals, revealing just enough of information about them for companies to decide if this is someone they want to pursue.
“PG Connects was the correct time to launch the platform as it provided the perfect opportunity to gather feedback from the target audience: the game companies. The Talent Board was still in a very raw form, but the reviews were good, and the audience really understood what our goal is”, asserts Bäckroos.
The Talent Board has been live for just over a week at www.gamesfactorytalents.com now and has started to reach its audience.
“We’ve partnered up with a few companies after PG Connects, and we’ve also had more talent signing up through the website. We invite any companies looking for talent, and talent looking for new career opportunities, to come visit our site and to get in touch with us.”