Kandria
Continuing the continued hiring, continued
When I wrote to you last week it was a very turbulent time for me, what with university troubles and the excitement of coming from a holiday and launching my first job offers. Things have calmed down a bit now, and I'm feeling much more confident in my decision on where to go.
As I wasn't sure what to do I decided to arrange a meeting with ETH's study adviser to talk it out. This turned out to be an incredibly good decision, and really helped me a lot. I was very positively surprised, as she took a neutral stance, really listened, and tried to help me decide on my own what I really wanted for myself. After an hour of talking and deliberating, I left her office with a stone lifted off of my heart.
I've decided to work on Kandria full time.
I'm really glad that I can finally just say that and stand by that decision firmly. My only worry now is whether I can actually make the project a success as well. As the Japanese say: がんばります! – I'll try my best!
Now, during that week the applications kept piling in. They not only doubled since I last wrote, but pretty much tripled. I'm at 134 applicants at the time of writing, and only just now managed to get through an initial review of them all. Evaluating the applications is quite time consuming, as I need to sometimes scrape together info from websites, and especially read relatively long sample writing parts to get a good feel for the abilities of the authors. Going through the pixel artist applications is a lot easier for me since I have experience with that, but I got far fewer of those than for writer applications.
It was interesting to stand on the other side of the job searching deal though. Seeing the kinds of mails I get and having to judge them also gave me good pointers at things I should and should not do if I ever have to apply for a job again myself. Since reviewing applications is all I did this week, here's some pointers I picked up:
Make sure to actually write an email or cover letter document. Some applicants just sent me a completely blank email with a CV attached.
Please actually apply for the positions that are offered, and do so through the channels that are requested. Getting applications through Twitter DMs despite asking for email contact is not encouraging.
Don't immediately talk about salary / hiring rates. Seeing that felt rather off-putting and too forward to me. It did not make me feel like this was going to be about building a shared relationship and a common project.
For a remote position like this, please make it easy to identify where you are located. Having to play a detective game just to figure out where you are isn't fun when there's hundreds of applications to go through.
Aside from a CV also make sure to include easily reachable sample material. Again, with hundreds of applications, having to take the time to ask for samples and wait for your response, or having to actually download a game, install it, and play it to get a feel for your writing style might be asking for a bit much.
It is worth the effort to invest time into a custom CV. I've seen a ton of CVs that used the exact same template with only minor alterations. Now, I'm personally not that picky about it, but it was refreshing to see people that put a lot of effort into their CVs. Also: standard CV rules apply – make it short and to the point. I know there's a lot of things one wants to list, but if it's too long and crowded, I'll probably just not read it all.
Take the time to read through the provided material and make it known that you did so in your mail/cover letter. It was super refreshing to see applicants that showed they read through what I gave. Some even went above and beyond and made custom material specifically for this or showed deep insight into the game. That was really impressive!
Now, take this all with the caveat that I'm just some schmuck indie guy that's hiring people for the first time ever in his life. I'm not a seasoned recruiter at a large corporation, but I think these are all points that would apply elsewhere too. With that said, I have a couple of applicants for both positions that look very promising, and I hope to start interviews this week. It'll also be tough to have to decline everyone else. I still need to figure out how to do that without feeling horrible about it.
The application review process aside, I also need to look into the legal side of things – making contracts, handling taxes and payment, all that fun stuff. Fortunately I don't need to pay any incorporation fees or anything, I'll just have to notify the social security agency, and I guess pay more taxes starting this year. Hooray.
With the applications taking up a lot more time than I thought I'm no longer sure I can make the demo release deadline for the end of the month. I'll try my best to focus on development and get in as much as I can, but it might have to be delayed by a week or two. We'll see. Out of the tasks I've wanted to complete, I did at least get the review system done.
In the game you can now hit a button that'll pause it and open a description dialog that allows you to describe the problem. It'll then automatically take a screenshot, create a save state, gather anonymous system information, and finally send all of that off to a private server of mine for me to review. That should make it a lot easier to give feedback than it used to be, and I hope people take advantage of it.
Here's the todo list for now:
I really hope that these "small" tasks actually remain small so that I can get things done quickly. We'll see how that went by the end of the week I suppose!