Founder, Teacher @ Outscal | Land Jobs in the gaming industry | EA, Kixeye, DeNA, Junglee, D.E. Shaw
In 6 months, we signed contracts with 75+ gaming studios to supply them talent and killed the product behind it. Why? Studios were ready to pay 15-20% fee on annual CTC of a candidate. That's a 100% premium on what industry usually charges. We saw all the signs of it working, but we decided to pivot completely. During 0 to 1 phase of our new product at Outscal, I and Manas Gangwani were actively experimenting on our product what now is outscal.com/jobs Manas being POC for first 15 partner game studio knew their hiring needs in-out. When he started interviewing candidates and having deep technical rounds with them, he was able to match candidates to the right companies seeing conversion rate as high as 60-65% Conversion rate here = Number of candidates hired/ Number of candidates referred. But, the system started to break as we started to scale. We first looped in our business team and on-boarded 75+ studios that were actively hiring game developers. Our B2B partnership team was connecting with HRs, hiring managers to understand their hiring needs. Sideways, we hired a technical recruiter who was manually matching the candidates to the provided job description. It was no longer Manas alone taking care of the whole process end-to-end. We were still able to get candidates placed but the conversion ratios came falling down. Quality fell as communication gap increased b/w tech interviewers and business teams. These were a few things that were screwed internally and could have been fixed to certain extent. (and we even did fix) but there were many that were beyond our control and played crucial role in conversions and eventually revenue generation. For example: Even when we did everything, absolutely right: - companies would decide to not hire, or delay hiring. - when companies were eager to hire, the candidates that were perfect fit for the role would reject the offer because they either didn’t like the game project or the niche that studio was operating in. - candidates or companies would call off the deal for even minute mismatch in their compensation expectations. The list of problems would go on and on. We soon realised that recruiting being a people-ops business didn’t gel up with our ed-tech minds. We decided to stick to the up-skiling game. (what we were best at) If you haven’t read the part-1 of this post then please check comments. In next post, know why we’re now betting on our game dev job portal. Follow me here 👉 Mayank Grover and I promise to bring the best gamedev content to your feed.
Prateek .
9mo
Finding right Product Market Fit is the real challenge, often realised while scaling. Although this gets blurred after fundraise , good to see Outscal navigating in right direction. Best wishes to the team, great reading about this. Cheers Mayank Grover
Shubham Behl
9mo
It was insightful but it's always difficult to predict any second order effect with a good accuracy ☺
Vishwas S
9mo
Looking for a game tester job for freshers Mayank Grover
Accountant
9moDid anyone else noticed that flower sketch behind the glass?