"Twice Reached Out" - Job Hunting In The Game Industry, Part 3

Another week has passed, and the gaming industry has been hit with yet another flurry of layoffs. The last seven days have been tough, not just for the industry, but also for me personally. Fortunately, there were just as many great surprises as there were setbacks. And the incredible reception to my previous article truly helped make this journey a bit lighter. So without further ado, let's get started, there’s a lot to talk about today.

The Story So Far

This has been coming for a while and now my last reserves have finally ran out, paying rent is not a possibility anymore, so next month I'll have to empty out my apartment and move back in with my mom, this is a first after having left my parents place six years ago to live in the metropolis. This also means I might not be able to attend Gamescom Latam if I don’t turn things around before late June. If I can’t attend, I plan to give away my tickets on LinkedIn.

As if that wasn’t enough, my Brazilian jiu-jitsu training also took a toll on me. Last Thursday, I ended up fracturing a finger and injuring my knee. Thankfully, it’s all healing pretty fast and isn’t too serious. It’s just a reminder to take things slowly and avoid getting too caught up in life’s whirlwinds.

Despite all of that, there have been many silver linings. Last week, I set a goal to secure at least one interview, and now I have two interviews scheduled for Wednesday! On Saturday, I took a short trip with my girlfriend to a beautiful waterfall and was able to refresh my spirits. I also managed to get a massive discount on a game design bootcamp I’ve been very eager to participate in, although I’ll be spending the rest of my savings on it, it’s an investment I’m sure will pay off soon.

What I've Done

In my previous report, I left things a little too vague as to what my next steps would be. I had many possibilities but I wasn’t very sure when and in what order I’d tackle any of it. Instead of wasting time devising methods of prioritizing or estimating impact, I chose to just wing it and try as many different things as I could and felt good doing. Here’s what I managed to do since:

Previous posts are already in the website's blog section.

• Created a blog to centralize traffic on my website, diverting it from Medium.
  

• Redesigned elements in my website to enhance CTA effectiveness and reduce excess content.
  

• Significantly improved the mobile experience, now the Professional Projects page is fully functional and the navigation menu has been prettified.
  

• Did an accessibility and SEO pass, now every image has alt text, every page has a meta description, and all headers and paragraphs are correctly tagged, contrast has been improved in some places.

• Included UTM tags in different links to my website to better break down the direct sources.
  

• Began the process of localizing the website and reports to Brazilian Portuguese.

• Continued with more applications more than doubling the initial count.

Most of the changes were made this Monday (May 20th), so any effects stemming from it will still take some time to surface. Hopefully by next week we'll have some indicative of the direction things will take.

What I’ve Learned

Insights from Job Applications

Not much has changed since the last report, even after doubling the number of applications. If anything, it helped make some potential correlations a bit more evident:

• Additional Automated Rejection: I received another rejection stating, “[…] despite your impressive CV and excellent qualifications, we decided to proceed with another candidate.” This lined up with a poor targeted resume score. No interviews ever happened.

• Recruiters from LinkedIn: At least one of the meetings scheduled I can confidently assert that the recruiter had first stumbled upon my previous post on LinkedIn, checked my profile, and then reached out to me via email. Another also reached to me through LinkedIn, but I wasn't able to confirm if they had found me through the post.

• Tailoring: I need to better tailor my resume even for product management applications. Applying for producer roles might not be worth the effort at this point, so I will focus more on product management positions.

Insights from Portfolio Website

The number of visitors almost doubled, and some patterns are starting to emerge. I also dug into some new data to make things clearer:

• Sessions Over Time: An oscillating pattern seems to have emerged and unique visitors continues to increase, now at 59 from 36. As before, many of those come as Directs, representing at least 76% of the traffic.
  

• Most Visited Page: Professional Projects is the second most accessed page, even though visitors were directed to the Resume page initially. This prompted me to start directing everyone to Professional Projects first with the changes I mentioned in the previous section.

• Filtering Out Bias: After filtering out my own IP, I found that my accesses accounted for at least 27% of page views. This has provided a clearer picture of genuine traffic as you’ll notice in the multiple examples below.
  

• Improved Bounce Rates: The bounce rate decreased from 82.5% to 63.8%. Referral traffic helped bring it down, with visitors from Medium having much lower bounce rates compared to those from LinkedIn, which was still faring better than Directs.

• Bounce Rate by Device: More visitors bounce when coming from mobile, which makes sense given the previously poor mobile experience but this is only a difference of couple of percentage points. I expect this to improve soon.

• Page Path and Bounce: The progression here is pretty obvious, as people go deeper into the website their bounce rates improve, following the hierarchy I had initially structured: 1. Home, 2. Resume, 3. Professional Projects, 4. Personal Projects, 5. About Me.

• Direct Source and Country: Those who visited the website by typing it out — which I assume was the case for most recruiters reviewing my applications — likely saw the link either in my CV or the fields I had to fill out in application forms. Sadly only Brazilian visitors had a significantly lower than 100% bounce rate. I had expected other countries would have something positive. Most, if not pretty much all of my applications, are for opportunities outside Brazil, so it seems to me that those recruiters were not interested at all.

• Slow Loading: Site speed on mobile could be improved, likely due to many images and galleries. This issue was less evident before, as the mobile performance score was at 77, so it needs further investigation.

Insights from LinkedIn

These findings were the most interesting and have convinced me to change my strategy a little bit:

• Post Impressions: Over the last 90 days, my two posts accounted for 89% of my total impressions. The first post peaked at 842 impressions on May 13th, and the second at 820 on May 16th. Notably, the second post had slightly fewer impressions over time, likely due to being posted during off-hours. This suggests that timing plays a crucial role in post visibility and engagement.

• Impressions to Profile Views: Since the last report, profile views have increased slightly, going from 67 to 80 viewers. Based on my observations, for every 50 impressions, I get 1 to 2 profile views.

• Profile Views to Recruiters: Let's do some dirty napkin math, disregarding any respect for serious statistics. Assume that the 3 recruiters that reached out to me from the 53 profile views I got since my first post is indicative of a pattern. Lets extrapolate that a bit and make another assumption, that for every roughly 20 profile views at least 1 one of them will be a recruiter reaching out to me with an opportunity, which almost guarantees a chance at an interview. Put that together with the previous bullet point to infer that every 1000 impressions one recruiter might contact me. If I reach 100,000 impressions, who knows where that might lead? I'm certain 100 interviews could land me at least 1 job.

• Profile Views to New Followers: Additionally, I also observed a ratio of 50 profile views to 10 new followers. This is only a weak correlation and I didn't dig any further to find evidence of it being a pattern. That said, with some more napkin math, this ratio suggests that to get 1,000 new followers I'd need around 250,000 impressions, which to me seems reasonably proportionate.

• Industry Distribution: 20.5% profile viewers are from the games industry, which aligns with my professional network, but this is heavily biased by the fact that 28% of viewers are colleagues from my previous job. I'm still largely speaking with my own little games bubble.

• Location Distribution: Another concerning point is that 54.2% of profile views are Brazilians. Given that two thirds of my LinkedIn contacts are Brazilian, this also reflects the struggle to break out of my local network. Ideally, I’d like to see more international profile views, as that is my target market.

What Comes Next

I had initially stated that my current strategy would be to wait out until there is more data before making changes and carry on with what I was already doing until I landed my first interview. It remains the case that there isn't sufficient information on some fronts, but the new insights I gathered from my LinkedIn posts have shown enough potential to warrant further investment. Plus, I have two upcoming interviews.

Given that these recruiter engagements have come organically through improved profile visibility, I’ll shift my strategy slightly towards creating more content and or increasing impressions. This approach seems to be yielding more results than sending applications, even when it comes to generating data. That isn't to say I'm pausing applications completely, I’ll continue applying at a pace of three per day, which has been manageable so far, but with a few caveats.

• Content Creation and Impressions: My new goal is to reach 20,000 impressions by the end of next week. I’m forecasting to be at around 7,500 impressions at the current pace. This means I’ll have to ramp up my content creation efforts, further optimizing it to maximize visibility. I'll also engage more with the LinkedIn community to nudge the algorithm into boosting me.

• Interview Preparation: Preparing for the upcoming interviews will be crucial. I’ll allocate time to study the companies and roles, practice common interview questions and such. Probably using some of the resources here. I might turn the learnings from these two interviews into an extra report, should I find the time.

• Website Optimization and Localization: I’ll continue to optimize my website for SEO and user experience, with an emphasis on improving site speed. I’ll also focus on driving traffic from LinkedIn directly to the new blog I've created, bypassing Medium to reduce bounce rates and increase engagement. Most importantly, I'll finish localizing all of the website and posts to Brazilian Portuguese.

• Application Strategy: While I’ll keep applying for jobs, I’ll not be applying for producer roles anymore.

I don’t believe I’ll have the bandwidth to tailor each CV to specific job descriptions. I am at a satisfactory state regarding my portfolio's and resume's content, so I don't want to touch on these for now. In a way, I'll be concentrating my efforts into making sure I'm being reached out by recruiters and alike rather than doing the reaching out myself.

Wrapping Up

After spending all of Monday and Tuesday writing this report, I’m now struggling to find the right way to wrap it up. This mirrors how exhausted I feel trying to balance everything while many aspects of my life are being uprooted. But despite the setbacks, I have a sense that something is slowly changing, which is encouraging. I expected it would take longer to see any progress at all, so I’m glad that’s not the case.

Anyway, thank you for reading and joining me on this journey! As always, feel free to comment your thoughts, whether they’re positive or negative — I value all feedback. If you’re not comfortable commenting, a reaction or a share would mean a lot. And if that’s not your thing, just stick around for the next report. I’m sure next week will bring even more interesting developments. Until next time.