What do you look for when hiring someone?

[Rayfa Khurain]

Hello everyone,

I'm not new to the forum by any means, but I've only recently begun to engage with the community. I've been meaning to get some experience working on different projects, but don't really know how to get started.

If you were/are a game developer, what information and qualities would you look for when hiring someone? More specifically, if you had to hire the following jobs:

-Writer
-Coder
-Artist
-Proofreader

What information would you expect to be given from them, and what qualities would you look for in them?

I understand that this is a pretty broad question, but hopefully, I can gain some insight from your replies.

I haven't really made any posts before, so if there are some problems with the rules, please let me know and I'll try to fix it ASAP.

 

[Carrera]

If I were to hire a writer I'd want to see some of their past work. For writers I don't really care if they've been in the biz and their only writing is short stories on a blog site. I've seen some amazing shit that some dude or dudette pounded out and posted on a blog never to be seen by anyone. (except me, I regularly peruse sites that host short stories etc)

Coder, this is pretty simple as I'd just need to know what they can do. My coders take a pre-hire test, I put them in front of a computer with a bunch of broken websites and expect them to fix it and explain what they do/did to do so. I don't really care about education and probably 1/4th of my nerds (affectionately called nerds, my biz would die without them) have no formal education in any sort of programming, they're self taught and as good as the others, better in some circumstances.

Artist, same as a writer. Let me see your work, unfortunately most of the "art" I use is more website aesthetics than "art".

Proofreader, don't use one. Other than for code by my nerds handle that pretty well. We occasionally have adult short stories hosted but we feel no need to proof-read them other than insure they're not plagiarized.

edit- this is how I used to do things, I'm almost completely hands off now days and have a full HR team to take care of stuff. To much stress, middle management exists for a reason while I would like to go back to doing things the old way, I just can't. The creature I've created has gotten to big.