"Rebranding"- Job Hunting In The Game Industry, Part 2

In my previous article, “What Can We Do Now?” — Job Hunting In The Games Industry, I outlined my struggle in finding a new role as a product manager with a passion for games. Like thousands of others, I am navigating a tough job market, and yet it can feel excruciatingly solitary to tread these waters, my hope is that being transparent and vulnerable about it, I can make it less painful to me and others. This is the first of my weekly reports where I’ll share the details of my journey but given the scope of these updates this first outing will be a tad dense as I'll be attempting to condense the last three months into a single article. So please, bear with me for a bit.

The Story So Far

After intense burnout prompted me to finally take action, I chose to sever all ties from work. Theoretically, I could have taken a vacation or a sabbatical, but I needed a clean break to truly address my anxieties. Those wrestling with their psyches will understand how crucial it is to disappear completely in times of mental anguish. For the first month, this break brought me peace, mostly through escapades in video games. However, the calm was short-lived, and by mid-March, I was grappling with an existential crisis, questioning my career and life choices. At its lowest point, I nearly hurt myself.

Thanks to several therapy sessions (I want to expand on this with another article, so put a pin on it), I managed to refocus. I decided to continue on my professional path but realized I needed to regain confidence in myself. I began by sending out some applications, many actually, but received zero responses. This lack of feedback, coupled with a resurfacing imposter syndrome, tanked my self-esteem.

My strategies so far had been unreliable, but through failure, it dawned on me that I needed something tangible to reaffirm my skills and achievements. My resume wasn’t doing it; it lacked substance, panache, something to gaze at like a medal or a trophy — a portfolio! I decided not to send any more applications and set out to build a palace for myself in the shape of a portfolio. That set off a chain of events.

What I've Done

What started as the desire to build a portfolio ended up almost as a rebranding exercise. Though it took longer than I initially planned, this month-long effort finally coalesced last week as:

• Launching My Portfolio Website: It began as a Notion page and turned into a full-fledged website built on Wix, showcasing my projects and achievements. It was an opportunity to flex my old web design muscles and to have fun writing in my own candid way.

• CV Overhaul: Inspired by the design of my new website, I updated my resume and rewrote it an ungodly amount of times, using automated tools for evaluation. (My initial score of 50 climbed to 97 with ResumeWorded)

• LinkedIn Profile Update: I standardized my LinkedIn profile to align with my CV and portfolio. I also requested recommendations from colleagues to enhance credibility. Many thanks to those kind souls.

• Certifications and Courses: I’m a self-learner and never had many certificates, so with a couple of free months for LinkedIn Premium, I completed courses and got certifications relevant to my skill set.

• Professional and Personal Projects: I revisited a lot of old projects, many lost in the recesses of my memory. When I could, I initiated new ones too. Even if some were brief, incomplete or completely out there, I figured showcasing all would do a good job of illustrating my range.

• Resuming Applications: With these updates, seeing my work in full display, I regained some of my confidence and started applying to jobs again. This time tracking my applications using a spreadsheet and putting the extra effort to write cover letters (I suck at those).

• Lifestyle Changes: I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, eating — a little bit — healthier, sleeping at 22:00 and waking up at 06:00, reading books before bed, and being more in contact with my family and friends.

• Creating Content: I never thought I'd do this, but here I am writing this article to you. It became part of the plan to break the mold and leave my comfort zone.

What I've Learned

Before we get going, keep in mind that the data here was gathered yesterday on the 14th of May. There’s a lot that might have evolved or changed as of the time this report is posted. Moving forward, I’ll attempt to get the most recent data possible to when I publish the next report.

There’s so much I could talk about all of the things mentioned above, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only highlight the results of my applications, my portfolio website, LinkedIn profile, and Medium, as these are my primary channels at the moment. Depending on the feedback I get from this post, I might consider detailing the process that went into creating all of these things.

Insights from Job Applications

So far, I’ve applied to 16 openings. Though not much time has passed, I’ve had a couple of rejections. There isn’t a lot of data to go through, but we can already glimmer a few things:

• Resume Scores: I have an average of 62.5 in targeted resume scores, and rejections so far have lined up with the bottom half of the targeted resume scores. Not enough to establish a correlation though. I do believe that there’s a lot of room for improvement here. I haven’t started tailoring my CV to each of the openings I’m applying to, something highly recommended by recruiters. At the very least, it would raise the average score, which isn’t a bad thing.

• Position Relevance: I have applied to both product manager and producer roles. While there is overlap between these disciplines in games, my resume is tailored for product management. This is quite clearly reflected in lower targeted scores for producer positions. It reinforces the point I’ve made above, but it also raises the question of whether I should even attempt applying for Producer roles. Applying to unrelated roles may dilute my efforts and lead to lower success rates.

• Cover Letters: I struggle with writing cover letters. Coincidentally though, the applications where I did include cover letters aligned with higher targeted resume scores. Just an interesting tidbit! Still, I have to find methods to evaluate my cover letters; they could do with a little improvement.

• Salary Expectations: One rejection was due to salary expectations not aligning. The position was based in Brazil and honestly our salaries are not too great here, especially compared to international companies paying in USD for remote contractors, which was my previous experience. My request was higher than their budget, so I got rejected immediately by the recruiter who had initially approached me, before I even got interviewed. I feel like I should just not provide any values in the early stages at all in the future, but I’m not sure yet if this is always a good approach. A middle-of-the-road approach would be to just provide averages for that particular role in its specific location and currency.

• Feedback on Rejections: One rejection mentioned that my area of expertise wasn’t the right fit for the role. Whether this was automated feedback or genuine, it aligns with the low rating I received for that application. There’s not a lot I can extract from this at the moment.

• Video Screening: One application got back to me asking to record an introductory video. Honestly, I hate doing this kind of thing, but I should attempt it nonetheless in order to move the status forward. This is a priority.

Insights from Portfolio Website

With the launch of my portfolio website, I’ve been able to gather some initial quantifiable data, even if just a few. The good thing about building it on a platform such as Wix.com is that tracking is pretty straightforward and out-of-the-box, so it’s ripe for analysis. Here are some insights I’ve gathered so far:

• Traffic Sources: The majority of my traffic (34 out of 40 sessions) comes from direct visits, but that doesn’t tell me much. There’s a lot I could do here to improve my understanding of where these direct sources are coming from. Is it from the link in my resume? Or from the ones I added in a few applications? Tagging those should be a priority.

• Sessions by Device: Mobile devices account for 58% of the site sessions, with desktop making up the remaining 43%. This emphasizes the importance of ensuring the website is mobile-friendly, something I wasn’t giving too much attention to. I initially built the website assuming desktops would be the overwhelming majority, it’s now pretty clear that isn’t the case.

• Sessions Over Time: The spikes line up with when I made most of my initial applications last week (9th of May) and with my first LinkedIn post on Monday (12th of May). That is expected and good, but not very actionable at the moment. I should just continue with the posts and applications until more clear patterns start to emerge.
  

• Sessions by Country: The majority of the traffic comes from the United States (23 sessions), followed by Brazil (10 sessions). I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of sessions came from the US. I expected Brazil would be at the top, given that most of my contacts on LinkedIn are Brazilians. But the lack of Canadians and Europeans concerned me, as I made a lot of applications for companies based in those countries and also have a good amount of contacts there. Nonetheless, I should consider localizing my website at the very least to Brazilian Portuguese.
  

• Bounce Rate: Quite high at 82.5%, indicating that many visitors leave after viewing the homepage. This is a huge concern for me and something I expected from the get-go based on how I structured my portfolio into multiple pages rather than as a one-pager, like I initially thought. That said, there’s a lot of optimizations I can do here before having to try a major structural revamp of the website, like CTA placement, copy, and overall navigation through the menu.

• Visitor Engagement: The average session duration is 6 minutes and 2 seconds. This is quite a significant time considering the high bounce rate, but it could be biased by my own visits as I was building the website. I should break this down and figure out what exactly is happening.

• Visitor Flow: Most visitors (79%) start on the homepage, but there’s a significant drop-off after that. Only 10% navigate to the “about me” section, and 5% to the “resume” page. The Professional and Personal Projects pages are the ones I hoped visitors would check out the most and should be the meat of the website. I should make changes to highlight them and also improve the mobile experience, as they are dreadful right now for those particular pages.

Insights from LinkedIn Profile

After posting my previous article on LinkedIn, I received substantial engagement that significantly impacted my profile’s visibility. Here’s what I found:

• Content Performance: The post received 1,622 impressions, a whopping 45,166.7% increase from when I wasn’t posting anything. Considering the number of engagements on the post, that’s a 1.6% engagement rate. I think this could be a lot better. Anyway, a good first data point that so far doesn’t suggest much beyond the obvious: I should post more. One thing I have to be mindful of is the time I’m posting, and I intend to come back to this topic in the next report.

• Profile Viewers: A 2,500% increase from the previous week. This indicates that the post successfully drove traffic to my profile, with a 4.9% impression-to-profile ratio. Pretty good for someone who had nothing just a couple of days ago. Posting really helps to bring more visibility to my profile, but whether this translates into more recruiters actually reaching out to me is still to be seen.

• Feedback From Friends: A handful of contacts I’ve worked with in the past have privately reached out to me to express how they enjoyed what I’ve written. The fact that it resonated with people that I love makes me very happy, and is what has had the biggest impact on me of all the things I’ve mentioned so far. If you are one of those: Thank you so much! You’ve made my day!

Insights from Medium

Honestly, there’s not a lot to go by here and it’s probably a waste of space to even mention it. My one post has so far gotten:

• Views and Reads: The article received 20 views, all from non-members. Of these, 11 were reads, meaning they engaged with the content for at least 30 seconds. Given that it is a 2-minute long post, that’s 25% of the article read. I think it’s safe to assume everyone actually read it in its entirety. And since I’m not familiar with Medium benchmarks, I’ll just assume that a 55% read-to-view ratio is good, for now.

What Comes Next

My current strategy is simple: I’m assuming I don’t have sufficient data to change my approach, so I’ll carry on applying to more job openings throughout the rest of the week and attempt to nail an initial interview. That’s my biggest milestone for now: Just a single initial interview.

There’s a lot of little things to add to my “backlog” from the findings I just went through, but nothing sticks out as a priority. That leaves me with two options: 1) I could do a pass at attempting to quantify the impact and prioritize these issues, tackling them by order of priority. Doing this now would help me keep things organized before they ramp up. 2) At the same time, I feel most are so minor and there’s so little data that it doesn’t warrant doing any study. I should just act on everything I can in the spare time between applications and interviews and take it from where I find myself in the next report.

At the time of writing, I’m unsure and too tired to decide. It is almost midnight and I have to wrap up this article. So I’ll sleep on it and we can figure it out together later. It is already a major achievement that I’ve gone through the motions to do the report and analyze everything. I should always remember to take it slowly and not be too harsh on myself. Job hunting is a marathon, not a race.

What I've Used

Here are some of the tools and resources used in the process of making all of this. I'll update with more as I remember them:

• LinkedIn Premium: LinkedIn offers free month trials weirdly with a lot of frequency, especially if you give up on paying after the first trial ends. I’m probably on my third trial right now. Actually if you use my referral link we both get 2 months! There are a lot of useful features that come with the subscription, so definitely worth a try. The best thing, in my opinion, is LinkedIn Learning, which has a ton of good courses that can be quickly done for certificates. Of course, they are not as prestigious as some other courses or exams, but something is better than nothing.

• ChatGPT: Don’t shy away from it, but also don’t let it do everything for you. I have a terrible time structuring my thoughts, so it helped me immensely when writing this article by making it more concise and coherent, but everything was initially written and then rewritten again by me. I use Plus and highly recommend it so you can use GPT-4 with large usage caps, but recently GPT-4 has been made available for non-paying users, so try it out! Steer away from GPT-3.5, it sucks.

• Wix.com: Not so long ago it was pretty hard to make a good design with Wix.com, and it didn’t have as much flexibility as creating your own website from scratch or using a more complicated platform would allow. This isn’t the case anymore. If you are resourceful, you can pretty much build every kind of website on it much faster than going the way of coding, and it will look and run just as good. But be mindful of its support for mobile design; by default, it’s pretty horrible.

• ResumeWorded: Look, I don’t know if this is good or not, but I used it to evaluate my resume and help me tweak its wording. By the end, I was pretty satisfied with the results. It’s also worth noting that it is extremely expensive, so I wouldn’t pay to use it for more than a month. You just won’t get that much value out of it from successive use after you’ve managed to score a good rating for your CV.

• Adobe Express: It helped me get some design ideas for my resume. It’s also a pretty easy tool to whip up a quick PDF with a custom design. Don’t pay for it though.

• Coolors: Great palette generator. I used it to find a nice palette for the website. I found it more intuitive and easier to use than Adobe’s alternative.

• Photopea: If you are familiar with Photoshop but can’t pay for it, like me, then this is your best free alternative, plus it runs on the browser. Its UX is pretty much 1:1 with PS, so you can get by very fast. Better than relying on GIMP, in my opinion. I used it for quick image edits, like blurring the places and locations of my application tracking screenshot.

• FlowCV: VVery easy to use CV generator/creator. You can do a lot of beautiful designs with it in no time. It offers enough flexibility to be able to do minor tweaks but without being too flexible that it tires you. Be careful though that it can break lines at weird places, making automated PDF readers have a hard time with it.

• Amir Satvat: A beautiful person with a heart of gold. I’ve used a lot of his resources for game job hunting, such as these guides and templates and more importantly this massive job directory.

• Product Portfolio References: A list of very well-designed websites and portfolios of some 249 product managers. I used it as inspiration for my own.

Wrapping Up

Through this whole process I’ve gained a lot of valuable insights, but I'm not going to tell you that all of it works, honestly I simply don't know but I intend to find out precisely by doing this exercise with you.

Moving forward, I will continue trying to be as candid as possible, I don’t want to mince words about how tiresome and frustrating at times it can all be, as it could very well be the case that none of this helps me in the end. But through this I still hope to create a way where anyone can learn from my mistakes and feel less alone when going through a similar situation.

Thank you for reading so far. I look forward to sharing more soon enough. And if you feel like it, please criticize, comment, recommend, share, like, do whatever you want. There's no ego in here, I'm not any better than anyone, I'm just another kid dreaming to make games for a living.