Hi there! We’re Aleksandra, Ana, Khrystyna & Vera – Tactile’s very own recruitment team. We have a bunch of things in common, including our love for 80s music, passion for knowledge sharing and the fact that none of us studied HR! Ana and Aleks’ backgrounds are in languages, Khrystyna studied international relations and Vera dove deep into the worlds of media studies, cognition and communication.

So, how can we still work successfully and hire new talents for Tactile without having an education background in this field?

Let’s look into what it actually takes to become a recruiter!

And hey, don’t get us wrong! We’re not saying that you should skip studying if you want to go into HR – if this is your passion, then you should pursue it as early on as possible. We just think that there are many different backgrounds that can lead into the world of recruitment and give you the soft skills that you need to be a successful talent acquisition specialist. Having a strong passion for working with people and loving to project manage are two great starting points!

For example, working in customer support or sales is great for developing a customer-centric approach. How does this play into the world of recruitment? We are the first person that candidates meet when they come into contact with Tactile. In a way, you could say that we act as gatekeepers for the company :). So being very customer, or in our case, candidate-centric, helps us to provide the best possible candidate experience to everyone interviewing for a job with Tactile. Furthermore, our customers are also our hiring managers (typically team leads) – building a relationship of trust with them is vital for having a smooth recruitment process in place.

At Tactile, we hire globally (and currently have over 43 nationalities just within our Copenhagen studio!). This means that we are actively reaching out and interviewing people from all over the world. Have you done an international student exchange before or studied something like international business management or international relations? These experiences can give you a great understanding of the role that culture and language play in human interactions. Understanding that different people communicate differently (in written or spoken communication) can help you to overcome biases and become a better recruiter!

For Vera, who is the latest addition to our team and is still wrapping up her Master’s degree in Cognition & Communication, becoming a recruiter was a way to combine her educational background and passion for people. One way she is doing that at Tactile is by working on her first DEIB initiatives, which amongst other things include writing educational articles on topics such as inclusive communication and implicit bias (you can find these on our LinkedIn page). On a more general note, Vera says that:

“Understanding cognitive processes and how people communicate helps me to better understand the needs and motivations of both candidates and hiring teams. The effective communication skills that I acquired throughout my studies help me to tailor messages to different audiences and communicate in a way that is engaging and personable. And I learned a lot about biases, mindreading and motivated reasoning and try to incorporate that knowledge into my day-to-day when assessing candidates. I also aim to share more of that with hiring teams in order to make our candidate assessment processes even more fair and informed.”

There are many paths that can lead you into the world of recruitment or HR, besides the traditional educational route. Because these roles are so people-centric, there are a lot of skills and knowledge which you can develop in other fields and then easily transfer into the context of HR. And whilst hiring people is not always easy, giving someone an offer for a job they’re really excited and passionate about, and then seeing the impact that this person has within the organisation – this is a truly rewarding feeling and without a doubt the best part of our job! ✨

If you’re curious about getting into recruitment or staying on top of current recruitment trends, take a look at these resources:

Recruiting Daily – News, events and resources for HR professionals

Hired – Reports and events around current recruitment trends

LinkedIn Talent Blog – Weekly newsletter with tips, strategies, and inspiration to help you hire and develop talent

Gem Blog – Recruiting trends

CelentialAI Blog – Trends, hacks and tips on topics such as AI & Recruiting, Customer Experience, Tech Recruitment & DEIB

Feel free to connect and network with our recruitment team on LinkedIn 👋

Did you know that our brains have two ways of thinking? One is conscious and slow, and the other unconscious and fast. This means that we think about a lot of stuff which we’re not even aware of!

We evaluate situations, assess people and make decisions that are based not only on conscious arguments, but even more so on biases. This is where our brains go unconscious: a bias is an unconscious factor influencing how we evaluate people, things or situations. We are biased every time when we don’t base our decisions and assumptions on objective and sound evidence, and we often don’t even realize it (if you don’t get it yet, no worries, we have some real-life examples for you a bit further down)!

Being influenced by things that go beyond our conscious control is nothing we should beat ourselves up about because it’s simply how our brains work! We’re all biased and we need to acknowledge that. We should also educate ourselves and learn about the ways our brains trick us.

So what is the most actionable and effective way of mitigating bias?

Recognizing it! It’s good to know that there are different types of unconscious bias (the academic term for that is “implicit bias”). As we’re celebrating Women’s History Month, we want to highlight the biases that particularly affect women. Within that, we’ll be focusing on the individual and on what happens inside each of our brains that leads to unfair assessments of women, their work and their achievements.

Gender bias

This bias happens when people have outdated ideas about what women are capable of or interested in. Consider this situation: A man and a woman are considered for a lead role that requires direct communication and fearless decision-making. Who’ll get the job?

Motherhood penalty

This bias occurs when people assume that women won’t be as committed to their jobs once they become mothers. This can lead to women being paid less, overlooked for promotions, and not given the support they need to succeed in the workplace.

Appearance bias

This happens when the way women look affects how they are perceived. Beauty, weight and height can influence how we evaluate women and can lead to us making a decision that is completely unfounded. Take, for example, an athletic, tall man – people tend to evaluate him as more disciplined and thus generally more capable.

Affinity bias

This occurs when people tend to prefer working with others who are like them, which can make it harder for women, who don’t fit the traditional mold, to get ahead. Example: a group of male game developers excluding a female team member from social gatherings because she wouldn’t be interested in their discussions anyway, right?

Confirmation bias

This happens when people only listen to information that confirms what they already believe, which can make it hard for women to be heard in decision-making situations. Imagine a situation where a male game designer dismisses a female colleague’s ideas for a game, because he assumes that women are not interested in those types of games. Someone who thinks this way might have been tricked by their confirmation bias!

Social desirability bias

This bias occurs when people say what they think others want to hear, instead of being honest. This can impact women’s ability to be authentic and effective leaders. For example, a person might not feel comfortable to speak up when their colleagues reinforce stereotypes about female characters in a game. They might not want to speak up as they don’t want to rock the boat and be seen as difficult.

Status quo bias

This happens when people resist change and prefer things to stay the same. This can make it hard for women to challenge the way that things have always been done and introduce new ideas. When a game development studio resists incorporating more diverse perspectives and backgrounds into their game development teams, because they believe it would be too difficult or risky, status quo bias is stopping them from doing amazing things.

Now you know what are the different situations which might bring your unconscious bias out of its cage.

And let’s not stop here: Think about which of these biases might apply to you? Write them on post-its and stick them somewhere you can’t miss, like your desk or monitor. Setting up visual reminders about our brains tricking us is us tricking our brains back 😉

Have you noticed that any of your colleagues might be affected by these or other biases? Help them out! We have way more influence on our thinking habits than we might think.

To tell immersive stories, you not only need the creative brains inventing and designing the narratives. What’s equally substantial are the architects bringing these stories to life – through tech! This is why we’d like to shed a light on our awesome Content Tools Team. They’re the unsung heroes responsible for optimizing story content flows and processes within all of our games. In this article, we’ll walk you through the contributions of this team–the internal and external team(s) structure, challenges, and examples of strategies and tools that allow us to create captivating and interactive gameplay.

Creative Tech Core

Known by various names–Creative Support or “Chris and Friends” (with Chris as the team lead)–our Content Tools Team forms the creative tech core of Lily’s Garden and other games in our portfolio. Their primary responsibility revolves around everything related to the game’s story, from crafting and fine-tuning the story workflows to addressing bugs and developing tools.

Their main focus is to ensure that storytelling within our games is not only engaging and fun, but also produced in the most efficient and seamless way possible, from both production and programming perspectives. One example of this is the MapActions tool, used by Cinematic Artists to author storylines and apply cinematics. It basically allows you to easily add and edit all the things that make a good cut-scene. It’s part of a larger tool called MapEditor, as most of the tools the team builds consist of several smaller tools, creating a modular building block system that increases simplicity and speed. As an example, in the below GIF, on the right, you see a mailbox crashing, some zooming in and out, and Lily’s verbal as well as non-verbal reaction to it happening – all easily and granularly adjustable with the tools that you see on the left.

The Tech

The Content Tools Team works within the Unity Engine, using C# for coding. This tech choice is key to maintaining a uniform and efficient game development process. They swear by consistent language, terminology, and Clean Code for effective communication, within the team and beyond. For instance, the terminology for storylines in Lily’s Garden is Story Arcs, whereas in Penny & Flo, they’re called Seasons – a seemingly minor detail that can mess with the game codes in unpredictable and problematic ways. Hence, uniformity and alignment are a big focus for the team.

Areas of Responsibility

Comprising a team of four, good collaboration between team members is the key to success. They work in rotations where they take turns addressing requests from other teams. This is how they make sure that requests from many different teams within Tactile working on the story are dealt with quickly and accordingly. 

And then there’s technical debt, an inevitable part of software development where teams are constantly reiterating on programmed solutions and making sure the technological infrastructure is on a par with current standards. It’s a big challenge that the team faces regularly, but they meet it head-on, making sure it doesn’t hinder our games’ evolution. Proactive and diligent, they clean up the codebase, keeping it fresh. 

To ensure fresh and clean code, team members participate in recurring refactoring workshops. Particularly new team members, coming with new perspectives and knowledge, are great to take on such refactoring tasks. The process is then for a (new) team member to take on an old feature and, put simply, update it and make it better. They make it better by going into deep focus mode for a period of time where they clean up the code, talk to relevant stakeholders and discuss improvement suggestions; is there anything that needs to be added? Removed? Improved? After having gathered all this information, they update the code and ultimately make sure it’s up to current industry standards.

The above image is an example of a recent update. On the left, we see the story flowchart tool that writers use to design and write the narrative. The Content Tools team did their magic and automated this process by building a tool that parses the diagram and inserts all the information directly into Unity. This creates the starting point for the Cinematic Artists to go ahead and fill in all the cinematic details like adding motions, facial expressions and items, as we can see down below. The highlighted area on the left image is the so-called “Dialogue Map Action” which was built by the Content Tools team to simplify the generation of visuals around a dialogue, like facial expressions and text. Thanks to the automation tool mentioned above, the text is filled in automatically and character expressions can be easily picked from a variety of options.

When they’re not juggling requests, the Content Tools programmers work on individual or joint projects. Collaboration isn’t just about tasks and projects, it’s also about having each other’s backs. With regular code reviews they ensure top-notch code quality, consistency, and adherence to the pre-agreed Tactile coding standards.

Story Content 🤝 Story Architecture

In this dynamic world of mobile game development, the Content Tools Team emerges as the story architects, weaving seamless story flows and tools and crafting captivating gameplay experiences. They’re vital contributors to the narrative architecture of our games that keep us engaged, enchanted, and coming back for more.