Recruitment tips when recovering from cultural issues
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Tuesday 26th April 2022
The past few years have unveiled issues with toxic cultures at game studios at an unprecedented pace. From Ubisoft to Funomena, the wave of whistleblowing has crashed onto indie and AAA alike.
While these scandals often prompt some immediate acknowledgement from the companies of improvement they need to make and new policies that will be implemented, once the bad headlines fall out of the news cycle, they are often reluctant to acknowledge those problems in public again.
Exceptions exist though, and one such exception is MidBoss. The studio's former CEO, Matt Conn, was accused of exploitative practices and sexual harassment in 2018. Since then, Cade Peterson took over the CEO position and addressed the studio's past cultural issues quite openly -- including in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz -- as well as the team's attempt to pick up the pieces and rebuild MidBoss.
It's also a process that Kim Shatzer has experienced second-hand as managing director of games-focused recruitment agency Onward Play.
"We get to see two sides of studio culture and studio HR issues," she says. "We see it from a talent acquisition side of 'Our reputation is not good, we need to fix it so we can attract more talent', and then we also see the culture issues in gaming from a candidate standpoint, because we are on the phone all day long with talent. And they're telling us what they're seeing in the field, what they've experienced in the past, what they've learnt from their managers, and what they like and what they don't like in culture."
She says there's been a growing movement of employees taking ownership over the culture of their company rather than just suffering from it, or going along
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