Category: Resume

How Not to Introduce Yourself

“I am looking for work and am a [role].”

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad approach this is to looking for work.

Let’s say you have an enormous network of folks who know you and your work, and would love to work with you again. Does this appeal to them? No – it puts the *work* on them of trying to figure out the details of what you want, or how to convince someone they know that you’d be interesting to work with.

Let’s say you don’t have a huge network of folks who have experience with you – what does this tell them? Almost nothing, other than “Yeah, you’re looking for a role that we’re hiring for. So?”

When you’re looking for a job, you have to make a case for why someone would want to work with you, and make it a no-effort, no-brainer, as much as you can.

“Hello! I’m a game designer who loves to build combat systems with a focus on strategic depth and visceral, immediate feedback. I recently worked on [game] that [had some particular thing that people who like combat systems will love], which [achieved some sort of critical/commercial success/accolade]. If you’re looking for someone who can make your game’s combat distinctive, memorable, and something players will love, [link to resume].”

The things you want to do are to be able to show you have a perspective on your job that comes from experience, that you’re a good fit for something that people are specifically looking for (even if it makes you *less* broadly appealing), and that you sound like a real human with unique skills.

Yes, this is more effort, and requires some introspection. But it also shows that you understand your job is to do the work, to make it easy for others to understand your value, and that not only can you solve the problem they’re looking to solve, you’re going to make the person looking to fill the position’s life easy.

DO NOT throw out random, generic, quick “I’m out of a job & looking for work – hire me!” statements. Doing so is putting your worst foot forward, and it makes a terrible first impression. Take a few moments and craft a statement that reflects who you are and what you’re looking for.

layoffs jobsearch resume

Interview Questions

As we go into the new year after a disastrous year for game industry workers (but not games, or game industry execs!), a reminder:

Your and your company’s values aren’t what you say. They’re not even what you do much of the time. They’re only genuinely tested when living up to your values costs you something.

So when folks come to interview at your company and ask, “How did you handle the pandemic?” Or “Tell me about that round of layoffs you did, and did your compensation change as a result?” Or “You previously said “Work remotely forever,” but then “recalled” employees into the office. Tell me about how you made those decisions?”

Those are questions that are asking about your values that matter.

And to folks searching for employment, I know it’s a hard time to ask tough questions, but *no* “theoretical” questions about values will ever be useful to you. The only questions that will illuminate anything interesting about a company are questions about what they *actually did* in difficult situations that are real. And frankly, going into the interview, you should probably already know the answers. You’re asking because you want to make sure that the folks you’re interviewing with are honest, and capable of telling you the truth.

To the execs & folks in positions of power: If you’re laying off folks, and then out of the other side of your mouth calling your employees “family”, I implore you to reconsider. Doing this is abusive, and exploits employees’ enthusiasm and/or naïveté for your explicit benefit. It is manipulative and exploitative. Don’t do it.

Be Specific

Hey, folks who are looking for jobs: Be specific.

If you say “I’m a recently laid-off Creative Director…” and you expect that folks will be interested based on your title… you could do better. Your job here is to hook peoples’ interest (and if you’re a Creative Director who’s not doing that in a post like this you’re not showing off your talent like you should).

What is it that people are looking for? What is it that YOU provide that others do not? For me, for instance, I can say, “Co-founder, Creative Director, Team Lead”, and it says something about me, sort of.

But if I specify that I have an established track record of building really effective multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative teams, that shows a kind of specificity. If you’re not building a multi-disciplinary collaborative team, great – I’m not for you. But if you *are*, you’re a lot more likely to ping me than you would if I just said, “team lead”.

But I can get more specific. I also work best in very early-stage teams, because a lot of my process is about building things and learning super-fast, which maximizes potential for success on projects where folks are building something genuinely new. Again, if you’re a huge company working on some iterative thing, great – I’m not the guy for you.

It’s a trade off – telling people your strengths means you aren’t going to be aligned with everyone. And that is a luxury in some cases. Sometimes you need to be everything to everyone, because you need a job – any job. But I’d also suggest that right now, it’s more important to stand out than it is to be “in the running” for a lot of roles.

So be specific. Tell people what your unique strengths are. How your experience and worldview have shaped who you are and what you do better than anyone else. Your job is to capture peoples’ attention and make them NEED to hire you. It’s not enough to say, “I’m a person who’s available.”

This is something most people are really not used to. If you’re struggling with this, I can help. No charge. DM me (with a copy of your resume and a blurb you’ve written for yourself) if you’re looking for a hand with this, and I’ll be happy to spend an hour with you working on it.

Getting Laid Off

We can all agree at this point that being laid off isn’t a mark of shame or a reflection of your quality, right? Companies making record profits just need to make record-er profits so shareholders can get $$$. It’s a cynical cash grab, and the large companies are all using each other as cover to do it while under the guise of some sort of “market contraction” or some other bullshit.

So if you have been laid off, no, it doesn’t reflect poorly on you. There is literally nothing separating you from someone who didn’t get laid off. It has nothing to do with whether they deserved it, or you didn’t. It’s just arbitrary and capricious.

When you’re applying for your next job, and someone asks you why you’re looking, my recommendation is to not hide that you were laid off. You don’t have to sugar coat it or try to evade the question. Just confront it head on.

If the company you’re interviewing with sees it as a negative, they’re so out of touch that that is in itself a red flag for *you*. But I don’t even think there are companies that are that out of it. They’ll just say, “oh,” and move on. When the folks who interviewed you talk about you later or write notes to the hiring manager, if they mention it at all, it’s definitely not going to be, “The interview went great, they were super smart, really qualified, had great questions for us… but they got laid off from their previous job. Pass.” That’s not happening.

Do not worry about having been laid off. Don’t worry about it when talking about it with your friends, don’t worry about it when interviewing for your next job. It’s just a thing that happened, and these days it could literally have happened to anyone.