How was 2021 for the company?
This year the Values Value’s strategy was based on three pillars: speed, quality and development. We have been improving processes, requesting feedback, learned a lot, introduced market analytics as a standard for each new vacancy for clients.
We started 2021st with four partners and co-owners. – As a result, we got record revenue, and four times higher net profit than in 2020. Two more employees will become partners in the new year: Valeria Bakhvalova, Head of Sourcing, and Alexandra Kononenko, Recruitment Lead.
It was great to be back at offline conferences and immediately set records for the number of vacancies on the job boards.
Back in the past year, we thought and talked a lot about ethics in game development, discrimination and ageism. Collected more than 2400 questionnaires in our “Big Salary Survey” of gamedev. It’s been a busy and successful year, but we’re glad it’s over.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider to be main within your niche?
The main trend in gamedev recruiting was the ever-increasing demand for employees.
The number of investments and investment funds is growing, more and more mergers and acquisitions are being announced, including Acqui-hiring, when a company is bought with the goal of hiring its employees, not acquiring intellectual property or a user base.
New publishers appear, hyper-casual genre gets mature and begins the development of casual and mid-core projects.
Western and Asian companies continue to establish studios in Ukraine and countries nearby, remote work has opened up the opportunity to hire our guys without relocation, and relocation to Europe has come to life after the covid shock.
If you add here the sustained success of local companies and teams, then you can imagine the scale of hunting and hiring in general.
As a result, recruiters have become “new producers”, their demand and salaries have grown tremendously. Throughout the five years of Values Value’s existence, we have been calling on game development companies to value their recruiters and HR, develop them and promote them to a strategic level. This “judgment day” has arrived.
It has also become more difficult for us to hire and retain Values Value’s employees. We make a big bet on the search for emerging talents and their consistent development, not just hiring established professionals. Our managers have powerful expertise, training skills, and they have established such an onboarding system and adaptation process so that even a pharmacist has become a promising recruiter.
Also, my partners and I have significantly revised the structure of salary in the team: we have increased the fixed part without noticeable changes in bonuses for closing a vacancy, we have introduced a monthly individual and team bonuses, as well as quarterly bonuses based on results of the entire company. We also began to participate in courses for recruiters and sourcers, conferences and events with HR topics without having relevance to game development more willingly.
What will be staked in the development of the company in 2022?
We will continue to improve processes and quality, invest more and more resources in the development of employees and the team as a whole.
We plan to develop the subscription model of working with clients, which we tested this year. We plan to get out payroll market analytics services from the secret mode and continue to develop in this direction.
Over the past year, we have almost completely switched to hiring Lead, Expert, C-level professionals, and the recruiting process of such specialists is longer. Our average vacancy closing time this year has grown to 47 days, and we are aiming for a challenge to stay within the 40 working days usually typical to lower-level vacancies.
The Values Value’s communication strategy is also changing, if earlier our target audience were client companies, now it will be recruiters and HR. All for the sake of hiring and retaining “new producers”.
