Making Games Industry Job Applications Accessible and Inclusive — Part 4

Published in

Crayta

2 min readMay 17, 2018

This is the final part of a series written about a survey we recently performed to try and figure out how to improve the diversity among applicants for jobs we advertised within the games industry.

If you missed the previous parts, you may want go catch up. We’ll be waiting for you here!

Part 1 — Background
Part 2 — Method
Part 3 — Results
Part 4 — Conclusions (you are here! ;) )

Now what?

So, we’ve got the data, what do we do with it now?

Gif of Winona Ryder looking very confused at an awards ceremony, with random maths overlaid.

Well, for now we haven’t split down the results into the different axes of under-representation (i.e. looking at what’s needed to get more women applying vs what’s needed to get more people of colour applying) as we didn’t really get sufficient results to do that.

However, what we can do is start to pull out action points based on the information we’ve been given.

Not all of these can necessarily be done by every studio (for example there may be a specific reason that remote working is not viable for you), and it may take time to put these into practice. But, these are our recommendations based on the survey and we will be trying to implement as many of these as possible.

These are very much in no specific order.

Action Points

Make salary information available alongside job descriptions
Provide a clear diversity statement (but be aware that that alone is not enough)
Provide information about (and photos of) the interior of the office
Be flexible with working times and locations (e.g. allow remote working, have flexitime) and provide details on your website
Enable your own employees to provide anonymous feedback (and follow-up on it)
Diversity isn’t just about the workforce, it’s also about players — games should be inclusive and accessible too
Don’t do crunch (this really ought to go without saying by now…)
Perform outreach — try and speak to people outside usual game development circles
Be upfront about the details of benefits
Include company culture information on your site, and don’t attempt to restrict employees from posting about the company on sites like Glassdoor
Write and share clear diversity policies
Communicate your diversity and culture goals internally to ensure employees are all on the same page
Don’t make company culture about beer pong and foosball
Be mindful when writing job descriptions — are your “requirements” actually all required or could they be “desired”? Are you accidentally excluding people with your language?

Gif of Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks saying “I am completely confident in the rightness of my actions”.

We’re going to attempt to put these into practice over the coming weeks, and will do a follow-up detailing how we’ve found the process (including any difficulties we ran into implementing these) and whether it made a difference.

Thanks for reading!