How to Tailor your CV for Recruitment

In the highly competitive hiring world, your resume or CV is the most important currency you have to access better job opportunities and benefits across the board. A great deal about improving your attractiveness to potential employers and companies involves offering the best career synthesis to increase your chances and add interest towards your profile.

Having this in mind is no less important in the gaming industry, particularly as competition gets more challenging in each discipline of game development. The current layoff crisis makes it crucial to create a bulletproof CV that simplifies the recruiter’s work and brings you closer to those highly coveted vacancies and positions.

If you have been wondering how to tackle this issue and provide the best resume available at each opportunity, you have come to the right place. This week, our blog post is about the techniques and perks you should consider to deliver a CV that accomplishes its mission.

‍

Read the battlefield before entering.

‍

If you have been reading our blog thus far and getting in touch with our weekly suggestions, then you likely know by now there is no single magic CV that will open every door out there for you. To be highly successful when applying for jobs, you must first read the job description carefully and look for any relevant lead about what the opportunity offers.

The first thing you need to do afterwards is to provide your contact details as thoroughly as possible. Offering recruiters the easiest ways to find you – phone number, e-mail address, LinkedIn profile, etc. – is paramount before delving into the following areas.

Your ability to summarise your work experience will be crucial to undertaking step two: describing why you are uniquely well-suited to the position you are applying for and what added value you bring to projects and companies once you are part of them. Keep it short and to the point, though: it’s in the following sections of your CV where the magic will happen.

Mapping out soft and hard skills is the next step. Usually, the best way to present this involves either a bulleted list of each or a tag-like approach where you use hashtags and keywords to get recruiters an easy way of putting your career highlights together. In the gaming industry, soft skills are as good of a selling point as your hard ones: attention to detail, communication skills, teamwork, creativity, and analytical skills are as essential to the work as knowing Zbrush and Maya or coding development tools in Unreal Engine and C++.

Requirements and responsibilities are usually bespoke to the position at hand, which means that, in most cases, you will have to demonstrate specific skills. Keeping these short and to the point will help you, especially with larger studios that gravitate towards a “filling the blanks” general search at first glance – knows Unity, check, knows how to do stylised art, and so on – and will then move to a more layered examination.

Getting as much information as possible about the studio and the vacancy they need to fill will allow you to showcase your strengths more efficiently. The employer usually determines what kind of corporate culture they would prefer at some point between the job description’s introduction and the perks and benefits section; learn to see these signs to deliver accurate insights on how you had or would have tackled work and life situations relevant to the studio.

If a studio says it values out-of-the-box thinking, provide them with an example of how you thought things differently in a game development project and brought a fresh perspective to the matter at hand. If a likely employer says it values ideas no matter where they came from, add simple examples of how your suggestions were instrumental to optimise processes and assets you were not necessarily in charge of.

Finally, being as thorough as possible regarding your job experience will ease proceedings for you and your recruiter. The most frequent way to organise previous employers and roles is from the most recent or relevant to the position you are applying for to the most distant. Start and end dates for functions and projects should be as precise as possible.

Also, unless the hard and soft skills you earned or trained for in a job are pertinent to the position you are applying for, you should consider removing all non-gaming-related work experience to streamline your CV better.

‍

The angels are on the details.

‍

One thing that we have been detecting in some of the resumes that we receive is formatting and output issues. If you are using an office suite or a design program, make sure that exporting the CV – either in .docx, .pdf, or another format – separates lines effectively and allows for copy/paste, as many CVs will usually go to an automated system or database at first.

These standards are a particular thing to ponder when using graphic design software or other editing programs, as an ill-exported file can be the difference between having your e-mail and resume read or not in some cases. Always ensure the exported file is up to standards and can copy and paste information to another program or database's outer layer.

From a design standpoint, it is vital to produce an easy-to-read CV where the information gets shown and explained as clearly as possible. Although free-to-use tools such as Canva made this increasingly painless, it never hurts to get the assistance of a professional or imitate what works on other resumes.

Depending on whether your current role or aspiration allows for demonstration of your skills, your resume should also include an updated link to your portfolio. Artists, designers, and marketing professionals should be particularly aware of this, as vacancies for these disciplines often ask for a sample of what they do.

Said portfolio should include recent, relevant works to your application. As we have said before, tailoring your portfolio to the marketplace’s demands is essential to success. If you are a video game artist, designer, or marketer, you can find great examples on websites such as Artstation, Behance, or Cara.

For the same reason, ensure that all links and instances on your file work correctly and are easy to use. You would not believe how many job interviews get botched or go on the wrong side of things just because of an incorrect portfolio link.

Tailoring your CV to gaming jobs can be challenging, but when you get to the thick of it, you will find great success in your future applications. Practice makes perfect, though, so start improving your resume with our advice as soon as you can!

And most importantly, if you are open to work, have been laid off recently, or are just looking for a career change, you can always come to us.

‍