We aim to provide practical advice and guidance on how to ensure workplaces are inclusive, how they might encourage a broader pool of talent to apply and how best to support people from a variety of backgrounds for the longevity of their careers.

Diverse Hiring - What You Can Do as an Employer

What is Diverse Hiring?

Diverse hiring is two fold - 

  1. Ensuring that hiring is fair, merit based, and free from bias. People shouldn’t be held at a disadvantage due to their age, sexuality, disability, gender, race, religion, mental health or any other characteristic unrelated to the requirements of the role. 

  2. It is about celebrating differences. Diverse hiring is an opportunity to add to the collective lived experience and perspectives in your team.

Why Hire Diversely?

  1. it’s the right thing to do. 

  2. It’s against UK law to discriminate against  protected characteristics.

  3. The opposite of diversity is homogeneity. Homogenous groups (groups of the same backgrounds and lived experiences) tend to think similarly. They may find it easier to get on, have the same interests and opinions… but they’ll also share the same blindspots. They’re likely to agree with each other, leading to an ‘echo chamber’ effect and reducing debate. This can be particularly destructive in creative teams - research shows more diverse teams may have more creative conflict… but ultimately come to better decisions.

  4. Video games are about story, characters and experiences. You probably (hopefully!) want to create great, diverse and authentic experiences and stories, and you want to reach a large and diverse audience. How better to do that to ensure your team is truly representative of the lived experiences you’re trying to represent, and the audience you’re trying to reach?

Who are you looking for?

It’s time to take a long hard look at yourself, as an organisation. You’re looking for people that will bring ‘cultural add’ to your team. What, or who, is absent from having a seat at your table?

You’re looking for fresh ideas, and fresh perspectives. You’re looking for people from diverse locations, diverse backgrounds, upbringing and access to education. You’re looking for diverse genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages, lifestyles, ability and religions. You’re looking for people with different requirements, who are perhaps caregivers or people with access requirements.

You’re looking for people who might find barriers to entry in your existing hiring processes. People who aren’t yet experienced or qualified in exactly the right combination you’re demanding, people who might have good reasons to require frequent home working, people who need visas, people with great experience but no university degree.

How to hire diversely

Audit your organisation and its processes

It’s easy to build blindspots or biases into hiring processes, so review them regularly. There’s a lot of best practice emerging, much of which is captured here, but there’s always more research you can do to stay on top of this.

Existing systemic biases mean different people have different opportunities throughout life, reviewing your hiring processes is a chance to try and counter this in your organisation, and unearth some hidden talents.

There are four areas you should be considering in order to improve your processes - 

Defining the role

People from minority and underrepresented groups generally get fewer and further between with seniority. Consider whether you can hire more junior roles, or make room for paid internships, even internships earmarked specifically for promoting diverse talent. Consider what you really want in any given team, and reflect this in your job specs. 

There is a lot of known best practice emerging for inclusive job specs (particularly around gender), so research and adhere to this. Including - 

  • Use inclusive, accessible, non-gendered language 

  • Avoid excessive use of ‘masculine’ language and superlatives like ‘rockstar,’ ‘strong,’ ‘lead,’ ‘competitive’ in favour of more ‘feminine’ language like ‘collaborate,’ ‘learn,’ ‘support.’ This will encourage women to apply, but it will not discourage men.

  • Include only absolutely essential requirements on your job specs, including seniority, years experience, level of education and number of shipped titles - ask yourself are these really requirements. It is well researched that women only apply for roles in which they meet 100% of requirements, while men will apply when they meet 60%. 

  • Include lived experience where it matters - e.g. if you want your narrative team to create stories and scripts for diverse characters, you’ll need relevant lived experiences in your team to speak to this characterisation.

  • Emphasise your inclusive benefits and D&I initiatives (more below...).

Branding - How to pique the interest of the right candidates

Consider all the avenues that you are communicating with your candidates, and what they’re saying about you and your culture - 

  • Your website, social media and online presence

  • Advertising

  • The games you’ve already made

  • Job specs

  • Word of mouth of current and ex-employees

To leverage these to the best you first need to make an organisation commitment to diversity and inclusion, so that you can authentically share this with prospective hires - and have your employers genuinely willing and able to advocate for you. 

Make sure you have D&I initiatives that you can celebrate and share - much of this ties in with retention initiatives, such as flexible working, shared parental leave, remote work, inclusive medical insurance policies, internal empowerment and celebration of minorities… more of this in [link:D&I IN RETENTION PAGE].

Given that you now have lots of wonderful D&I initiatives, build these into your branding from the ground up. To an underrepresented candidate, not only knowing that you have these initiatives, but that you publicly celebrate them will make them feel much more welcome in your organisation. 

Outreach - How to speak to the right candidates 

You’re trying to break out of the homogeneity you have - to reach groups outside of the networks you have covered in your team already. This means you’re going to have to put in some effort to reach those fabled ‘diverse candidates’ you’re looking for, to encourage them to apply.

  • Head hunting and recruitment

    • Make sure you’re clear on your expectations about diversity with external recruiters, encouraging them to put forward candidates from diverse backgrounds.

    • Follow hashtags and trends in social media celebrating diversity, which often link to portfolios and other work samples of candidates you might not otherwise come across.

  • Advertising and social media

    • Make sure your job adverts are seen by the underrepresented candidates you’re after. Consider your usual avenues of advertising - are they in publications known to reach a diverse audience?

    • You can use targeted advertising in online ad-platforms to reach outside your usual bubble.

    • Be smart in your use of social media, follow and use hashtags celebrating diversity, tag special interest groups with your job ads (like @outmakinggames!), follow diversity advocates and get to know the influencers in this space. 

  • Word of mouth

    • Be a great place for people to work, particularly with regard to D&I, and your employees will sell it for you! See also [link:D&I IN RETENTION PAGE].

    • Be cautious of employee referral schemes. These more often than not contribute to your homogeneity as most people associate with people similar to themselves. Make your commitment to diverse hiring clear, and ask your employees if they know potential candidates who belong to underrepresented groups. Make sure you put referred candidates through the same rigorous selection process as any external applicants.

    • If you have internal networks of underrepresented people, involve them and gather their input into how best to reach other underrepresented potential candidates.

Selection process - How to assess candidates fairly

The main considerations for selection processes to keep them fair, are standardisation, identifying and removing bias, and training.

  • Interview process

    • The interview process should be objective. It’s not a fun chat to see if you have shared interests, it’s about seeing if they can do the job you need them to do. 

    • Standardise the process, have a question bank so you can compare candidates on the same terms. It should be skills based, and consider using a scoring system to keep things as objective as possible. 

    • If ‘likeability’ is part of the criteria, measure this explicitly and weigh it against other criteria for the role, and think about what it really is that you mean by this. 

    • Try and include underrepresented colleagues in the interview process to get a diversity of perspective on applicants.

  • ‘Cultural Add’ not ‘Culture Fit’

    • You’re looking for people who break your mould and bring new experiences and perspectives into the team. Actively look for this, give opportunity through your interview process for candidates to speak to this. Make this a criteria that you measure and consider prioritising higher than a particular piece of technical experience that can be learnt.

  • Training

    • Train everyone involved in the selection process, and help them understand why it exists

    • Provide unconscious bias training for everyone involved in the selection process, including those screening CVs or writing job specs.

      • Unconscious biases exist in all of us, based on our own particular lived experiences. These include ‘affinity bias,’ ‘the halo effect,’ ‘status quo bias.’

      • It’s a great idea to make sure everyone in your team gets this training, that it’s refreshed regularly and that new joiners don’t slip through the gaps.

    • Further training on understanding challenges of minority and underrepresented people for your whole team will help increase empathy and for your team to embrace the process.

    • It’s also important to train interviewers to respectfully discuss the pronouns of any candidates reaching interview stage

  • Code tests…

    • Screening for technical skills is a great challenge. A lot of traditional form code tests or whiteboard coding exercises screen primarily people who can function under incredible amounts of stress and anxiety, or those that have prepared extensively for exactly this contrived situation. These cause a tremendous amount of false negatives, and it’s underrepresented people that suffer worst with this. Consider take-home code tests or sessions in which the candidate is left to do the test without the watchful gaze of an interviewer, or whether you can fairly assess technical skills without such contrived situations.

Finally...

  • All of this might seem like a lot when you’re just starting out, but the fact that you are interested in making positive change in your workplace is the first and most important step. The key is to make an organisational commitment. Communicate it to your people, and set yourself goals. Remember each baby step is a step in the right direction. There is emerging more and more best practice to support you in this journey and you certainly don’t have to go it alone. Many consultant organisations exist who can help you audit and refine your recruitment processes to make your studio and even better place to be.