Gamasutra Podcast: GameRecruiter's Mencher Talks Industry Careers

Gamasutra is proud to present the latest Gamasutra Podcast, part of our regular weekly GDC Radio podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences. For today's interview, we get some advice from veteran game industry recruiter, Marc Mencher. Marc and his staff at GameRecruiter.com have 18 years of experience recruiting the technical, production, and executive talent who make up game industry companies. Marc and his firm specialize in strategically important and un-advertised jobs in all segments of the game industry. These are the kinds of positions you won't find in the classifieds or on job boards. Marc believes in a career-building approach, rather than placing candidates in one-off positions. Marc draws on his 25 years of experience to impart advice to anyone looking to get, and keep, a job in the game industry. We discuss the absolutely crucial role of networking, how to introduce and sell yourself at industry events, how to use job postings as a lead source to take control of your job hunt, and how to stand out among the hundreds of candidates applying for a given position. In separate segments, Marc shares some practical tips on how to break into the game industry, how to build your skills with the goal of assembling the right work samples, and how to start building your industry mentors and contacts. And he gives his opinion on the value of attending a specialized game school. For those of you with a few releases under your belt, we talk about how to track industry trends very specifically, and how to keep yourself employable and valuable in the market. We also discuss the impact, from a hiring perspective, due to new consoles, production pathways and agile development, outsourcing, and freelancing. Marc also provides some insight into the career viability of new growth sectors, such as the mobile and MMO markets, and some of the forces defining the influx of talent from other entertainment fields, and the departure of veterans from gaming into other industries. To round out the discussion, Marc shares his take on this year's Game Developer Magazine annual salary survey, and how it stacks up against his experience. You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Marc Mencher (.MP3, 63 minutes, 29 MB). In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.