How We Make Sure You’ll Fit the Team You Join

Welcome to Tag’s HQ 👋 - based in the beautiful and vibrant city of Dundee, Scotland.

At Tag we know that when you start a new role in games, you don’t only join a company; you become part of a team.

Your role isn’t just a job title or the work product you’re responsible for creating - it’s about the people you work with, and how effectively you all work together. More than that, it’s about your immediate team; the colleagues you collaborate with directly or most frequently. And that’s as true in a world of remote working as it is in times when we share studio space.

Of course, any role in a games company is about getting the job done well. But working with people you connect with professionally and personally both serves the wellbeing of the entire team and delivers better results. At Tag, we try to build teams that not only work well together but enjoy doing so at the same time.

That’s why we have developed an approach to hiring that endeavours to make sure we don’t solely focus on an applicant's discipline-specific experience and skills. Inviting the rest of the team to be part of the hiring process means they have the opportunity to meet, greet and evaluate potential new team-mates themselves, and gives us some insight into what the dynamic is likely to be between applicants and the incumbent team members.

CONNECTING OUR PEOPLE

Much of our hiring process will feel familiar to anyone who has been involved in recruitment. We identify areas where we need talent, build out the job role, consider the essential skills and benefits, and recruit in the usual ways, posting the job where people will find it.

So far, so conventional. That kind of approach isn’t broken, and it doesn’t need fixing. Responsible hiring starts with making sure a role with value exists, and getting that opportunity out to as many people as possible helps us find the right person for a role that suits them, ultimately helping elevate our ambitions as a business.

There’s a little variance across different roles, but once we’ve selected the applicants with the most potential, we most often start with an informal phone conversation, purely to get a sense of the human behind the CV, validate what’s on the CV and assess whether they are suitable for taking forward. Then, for roles such as code, art, design and product management, we typically have tests for those disciplines, which we ask candidates to complete as the next stage in the process. When the successful test results come in, we arrange the next stage.This is typically one or two more meetings or calls, the first being discipline specific, and the second including potential co-workers from the wider project team. Traditionally that would be in person at our office, but currently everything is happening via Zoom.

And it’s at those meetings that we do things a little differently.

The team collaborating in one of our meeting rooms ✍

GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER

“At that stage what we would do is get the candidate in front of the team that they’re likely to be working with” explains Tag Games Head of Production, Carol Clark. “And then, with each development team - with each project team - we open it up to the whole team, and we just ask who wants to be involved in the interview, because that’s really important. Candidates are evaluated [in two ways]; one, from the perspective of, if you’re a coder: ‘What’s the quality of your software?’. ‘What’s your approach to coding?’. That’s important. But what’s just as important is: ‘Do you fit as part of this group of people?’.”

We take that approach because each of our teams works on different projects, and some can be working with different clients or partners. The teams have different personalities, and while there’s an overall spirit to what Tag is as a games company, and how people fit that, we want people to be the right match for the team they join. That’s for the benefit of the new person, the existing team, and the results we want to achieve. If you are on your way to joining Tag, we want you to find yourself in a group of game professionals that you enjoy being part of, and that you work well with.

Now, being ‘interviewed’ by a team might sound intimidating. But we make sure it’s welcoming and informal. We don’t set the questions team members want to ask, and don’t expect an entire team to attend. It isn’t about bombarding an applicant from all sides with questions from a wide range of interviewers; it’s much more like a conversation.

With that done, we collect all the feedback from everyone who was involved in an interview loop. That feedback is taken into consideration by the hiring manager before they make the final decision on a candidate. This approach helps us find the right person for the role and the team, but it also means our people have a level of investment in every new start because they helped to choose them. It’s worked for us time and again, and we absolutely believe it makes Tag a better place to be part of - not least because when you turn up at your first day of work with us, you already know you’re part of the community of your new team, and you know we’re truly invested in your success.

A HOME FROM HOME

Elsewhere, we take a similarly informal, human-centric approach to letting graduates spread their wings at Tag.

“There’s no actual graduate scheme in place,” confirms Marc Williamson, Tag Games CEO. “We bring people in as soon as we feel able to do so, and put them on commercial projects - obviously with support from their team and their managers. And they go straight on to delivering projects that they put their names on, and [that] go live. It’s worked for us for 14 years. Our current CTO was a graduate that came straight out of Abertay, and actually our founder Robert Henning - as I said before - was a graduate as well.”

Ultimately, whether hiring an experienced developer or welcoming a graduate, it’s about doing all we can to make sure you’ll feel at home when you join Tag. It takes a little more effort on our part, but we feel it’s more than worth it to find the right people for Tag. After all, a game company is nothing without the individuals it is made up of. It makes Tag a better place to work, and a better company that creates and contributes to better games.

So, if you are interested in joining Tag Games, do visit our careers page, where you’ll find available roles, and information on what life is like at the studio and in its home city of Dundee. And who knows, maybe one day soon you’ll be meeting one of our teams to discuss how you might be a part of our future. And you can find out a little more about the studio and hiring process over at the Aardvark Swift podcast, where Marc and Carol recently shared heaps of insight on the type of game company we are.

Hiring at Tag: A Team Effort

How We Make Sure You’ll Fit the Team You Join

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