Experiences From My Unexpected Dive Back Into the Job Hunt

Last year was quite a trip which ended up with me finding myself working in a new company. When the year started, everything seemed steady at Action Squad Studios, but then our publishing contract was suddenly terminated due to reasons that were out of our control and all of us had to look for a new job. It was an interesting experience in many ways, especially as I’ve not been actively looking for a job for fifteen years and it was the first time in my career when I was not leaving the company on my own decision.

With that background, looking for a new job seemed like quite an adventure to jump to. It was also a pretty interesting experience seeing how recruitment works in different companies, and I thought that it might be something interesting to share with all of you.

Having also recruited people in the past, I surely learned a lot in what I can improve if I’ll be doing recruitment in future.

Background

I’m a guy that you happily call a senior developer (or as I keep telling, maybe even a senile developer) with 20+ experience in software development, majority in games development. I’ve had a variety of roles from programming and management to process development. But let’s not dive into details there, as that can be seen in my profile. Just to put it in a nutshell, I consider myself as one of those mysterious senior developers that everyone tells they are hunting for. I’ve also been interviewing and recruiting lots of people in my past, so I am pretty familiar with recruitment in a couple of different environments.

However, being in a situation where I need to start looking for a job to not become unemployed was a stressful thing. While I was telling myself that with my experience and skills it should be no-brainer to find a job, there was this nagging ghost in the back of my head telling “But what if ...”. Confident, but a bit nervous, I decided to get into the action.

Looking for job

One of the hard parts for me was actually to think about what I would like to do. With my earlier background, I could be doing lots of things. It also could be that there could be some really nice opportunities and jobs that I could have not even imagined of. I also did not have a really clear picture on the usual salaries of the industry and so on.

What I decided to do was to not actually start applying yet anywhere, but post to LinkedIn about my availability.

In my post, I mentioned about the situation, my background and that I’m actually interested to hear about different kinds of opportunities. After that, I decided to wait a bit and see if I get contacted through that or if I need to start going through job ads.

I posted this at the start of August, right after the usual summer vacation period ends in Finland. In general, I was looking for remote job, so the timing was more due to the fact that I wanted to take a good rest during summer vacation before focusing on job hunting.

First phase, the initial contacts

During the first week after my posting, I did get a couple of contacts, but not that many. One was interesting to some extent and as it was through my earlier colleague, we had a call and chatted a bit about it. However, it was pretty quiet with bigger gaming companies that I initially thought might be interested in me as well, so it was time to get a bit more nervous. In the second week when people had clearly gotten properly back from vacation mode, the contact requests started to increase though and I could rest my nerves a bit, for a moment at least.

At this phase, I tried to go through some initial chats through LinkedIn to figure out if we are at the same page at all and if the job would be something that I could be interested in.

There were quite a variety of ways that people approached me. Quite often it was quite a nice introduction with people introducing themselves and telling what they have in mind and if I’d be interested to talk with them. That is pretty much what is expected. Then there were some earlier co-workers and friends who contacted me a bit more casually, once again as expected. But getting into details pretty quickly. Then there was a group of people who I did not know before, but whose contact was more in line “We are doing x” “We have some jobs” and nothing else. Sort of grunting towards me and expecting me to dive into their profile to see who they are and where they work. Quite often their future responses were similar when asking more details, like really not shedding any light to the thing. As can be guessed, those conversations never really moved forward.

Second phase: Initial calls

There were a handful of contacts that I thought were interesting enough to set up a call with. These included some exciting start-ups, some AAA game studios, a big mobile game studio and one recruitment agency. 

These calls were for me more to get a feel if the companies feel right for me and get more details on what kind of job there could be available.

In some cases, we had a couple of more calls there as well to discuss some details before going very in-depth in recruitment itself. However, this clarified the companies I’d move forward with. I had to skip the extremely exciting start-ups, mostly because their offers were too far from my requested minimum salary. Even though the salary has never been a priority in my career, it was also important to be able to keep it at least close to the level I had before to not have too big a hit on the income level of my family.

In many ways, I think that all the initial calls were really nicely handled, and I got a good impression of the companies and what there would be to offer. One interesting thing that I noticed was that actually a couple of the companies did not yet know what kind of role they would want to offer me, but they knew that based on my background they’d want me and were now interested in looking for a suitable role internally.

So, when looking for the senior positions, it might be that even though the position does not yet exist, there are companies that could find one for you still.

Third phase: Recruitment process

This was the part where there lots of variance between the companies. On one end of the spectrum, there were companies that could have gone through with two interview sessions when on the other hand there were companies that would take it through six interview sessions or so. 

From a job-seeker perspective, it is of course much more time consuming to go through the six interviews than two, but on the other hand I also noticed that it is not always about the number of interviews themselves.

One of the things that I was very clear on at the very start was that I was on a tight schedule as I wanted to jump into a new job right after my old one finishes, so that I’ll not be unemployed in between. Based on that, we usually agreed that we will move the discussions on “fast lane” to get the process to move quickly forward. So, there was a bit less than a month to go through the process. Most of the things seemed to start smoothly early on and we were able to set up initial meetings quite smoothly.

Then the variance happened.

One of the companies was extremely quick to move forward with. They had many interviews to go through, but they were clearly scheduled and whenever one phase was passed, we could have another interview in a couple of days already. All of these interviews were done remotely. This was actually done together with a recruitment agency, which likely had an effect on that. It was an extremely professional experience that did set a level on what quality recruitment experience really can be. Credit where the credit is due, the HP's award for best recruiting experience goes to Melanie Lindsey and not named game studio!

On the other end of there was a company who had an internal recruiter who almost never kept on a promised schedule. Even worse, they often did not even contact me for schedule changes, but I had to be asking after them when the deadline had passed. Sometimes they did not respond even after that but delayed it even longer. I got an impression that they were not internally really prepared to put effort into getting the interviews arranged in timely manner, but I would have expected at least honest communication in that case. In the end, I had to politely cut the process with them after extending the agreed deadlines for interviews multiple times. This was shame, because I initially thought that company as one of the top candidates.

Recruitment processes with other companies were something in-between. It was surprisingly common that recruiters did not keep their agreed times or suddenly went quiet for a while. It seemed to me that they did not internally get some desired information and waited for that. However, as an applicant I would have loved to hear that “Sorry, but I’m still waiting for some additional information, and I’ll give you an update in two days” rather than just have silence. Thinking the past, I’ve also most likely been guilty for this. Sort of waiting some information for the end of the day and then the next morning and then onwards. But looking at it from the other side of the table, I should have really done differently there back then.

Based on this experience, I got the impression that even in bigger companies might have quite a lot to improve in their recruitment process and practices to give a positive impression about company for the applicants. In addition, the internal delay on recruitment is likely hindering their chances to get senior talent they want and delay their recruitment processes. I’ve sometimes heard companies in Finland being loud about legislation slowing down getting senior talent from abroad, but with my recent experiences it might not be just about legislation. The impression I got is that even hiring an available senior talent inside Finland, might take up to two months due to inefficiency in their own internal recruitment processes. I would not expect that to improve with candidates coming from abroad either. A process that some other companies with an otherwise similar recruitment process can do in two weeks.

From perspective of applicant, it really seems that you have to reserve a long period of time when switching job if you are looking to end up in some of these companies. I would expect something like two to three months even.

Fourth phase: Closing the discussions

In the end of the process, there can be only one company to sign a contract with. I was happy that in the end I had two good concrete offers on my table, in the desired schedule.

There were some others involved in discussions still during the last week as well (and even the day before I made my final decision), but they could not meet the deadline and I had to politely end the recruitment process with them. I could have of course waited for them a bit longer, but on the other hand I really wanted to keep the deadline on my end with the companies that had done their part on keeping it as well.

One of the interesting things, in the very end but also in the earlier phase of recruitment process, is how to conclude the negotiations. On my part, I have thought it important to try to close things properly. Sometimes things might just not match, but you never know of the future. In most of the cases, that was mutual.

However, there were also a couple of cases when I received no response anymore after telling them that it is time to part ways here. It is strange that when you have been discussing with someone for two weeks or nearly a month and then come to the decision that things are not matching and wish them well, you will get just silence. In a way, I don’t expect to have anything fancy, but just responding for example “Sorry to hear. All the best in your new job”. That kind of small thing really does have a big effect on the next time I’d be considering entering the recruitment process with that person and company.

But as mentioned, in most of the cases, people understood the situation really well. On a personal level, it was pretty hard emotionally to end some of the negotiations. This was especially with persons and companies that there had been longer discussions already and they clearly seemed to want you to work for them.

In the end, a decision was made. So, what made the difference when choosing where to go?

The most important things were that

• I wanted to join company which really seemed to want me there a lot
• I had a good feeling about the persons I’d work with
• The role itself seemed exciting

The final two companies had all of those things checked, but in the end the role I was offered at Remedy felt a bit more interesting to me. It did not hurt either that I had worked with some of the persons in the company in the past and knew that they are a good bunch to work with.

Summary

So yes, quite an adventure. A bit nerve-racking, but also something that was truly interesting to see through and learn from. Maybe I'll try it again after another 15 years or so!

It is of course important to remember that this is just my individual experience and others might find their experiences to be very different. Therefore, it is also good to note that the pieces of critic included in some cases are not something to be too personal there. It is more of my impression how the process felt from this side of the table. I would think they are there more to share with people what they might expect and if the encounter similar situation they can know that it is likely not happening just for them.

Looking of for new job can be nerve-racking and ensuring recruiting the right person to your team can be hard. I truly wish that sharing this experience can be useful for some of you, on either side of the table.