What Does It Take?
Thursday night Allie went home early and was now lying on the couch with her head in Derek’s lap. They were watching a cupcake baking contest. Or a baking contest that had a cupcake section. She wasn’t really paying full attention, just trying to distract herself as she watched people frost things.
“They all suck,” she said.
“Hmm?” he replied, glancing down from the TV.
“The candidates.”
“For governor?”
“For the jobs at QuiltWorld! Though that, too. And these bakers are idiots as well.” She waved at the TV. “The job candidates I’m interviewing all suck. I don’t get why they are applying at all. I don’t even want to do a phone screen, but I guess I have to. I’ve got to get some bodies in place.”
“Do you want a body, or the right person?”
“What do you think, Sherlock?”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Some are way too senior, others . . . not unqualified, but mis-qualified?”
“How did you write your job descriptions?”
“I got previous job descriptions and modded them.”
“Hmmm.”
“Hey now, with that hmmm. Modding is a great way to get somewhere. We do it in game design all the time. You take rock, paper, scissors, add a new theme, a little story, and boom. Best seller.” She nuzzled the warmth of his leg. He smelled pleasantly of fresh laundry and himself.
“It works if you know you’ve started in the right place. What are you hiring for?”
“Oh, God.”
“Okay, what’s one of the roles you are hiring for?”
“Art director.”
“What makes a good art director?”
“They are . . .”
She stared at the TV. People were running around frantically, building towers of cupcakes.
“They are artistic. I don’t know, they make the game pretty.”
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m tired.”
“Who is the best art director at SOS?”
“Jamie Fittich.”
“Why?”
“Everyone says so.”
“Interview her . . . him . . . they?”
“They.”
“Interview them tomorrow.”
“For . . . ?”
“Ask them what makes a good art director. What makes a bad one? What hard skills an art director should have. What soft skills. What kind of experience. Then ask them who else to talk to.”
“Because?”
“Now you are messing with me.”
“No, you know I love it when you share your secrets of the dark arts of HR with me.”
“Promise to only use this knowledge for good?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You need to understand what you need in an art director. Not just what the industry wants. Each company is different. Each company has its own ideas of good. Jamie has shown they get it. Talking to them will give you the information you need to write a good job description and hire more accurately.”
“Okay.”
“You keep telling me SOS is different from most of the game industry, right? It’s built on a more Internet approach, focused on metrics and iteration and being goal driven. So not everyone will be able to thrive in that environment.”
“I don’t want to scare anyone off.”
“You do want to scare people off—people who will fail in the job. Don’t throw a wide net. Throw a tight one and catch the person you really want.”
Friday evening everyone had disappeared after happy hour, but Allie grabbed the small conference room and shut the door behind her.
She had held three interviews with good art directors in SOS to understand what the job entailed. She’d collected five job descriptions she’d found on the Internet from companies she respected. But she’d been so busy that week, she hadn’t had time to make sense of what she’d gathered. She sat there and went through her notes. She highlighted anything she thought was relevant to her search. It was all over the place, though. Everything from software to “understands creative people.” What was she going to do with that?
She sighed, went back to the main room to grab a bottle of wine and some cheese from the Friday happy-hour leftovers. The elves had not appeared yet to clean up, so she made herself a stash and took it back to the conference room.
She had just gone back to her staring contest with the printouts when the door opened a crack.
“Oh, hi!” It was Kendra.
Allie jumped. “I thought everyone was gone!”
“I live in Marin. No need to face that traffic on a Friday night. I’m working on a couple of ideas, and then I’m grabbing dinner with some pals. So. Whatcha doing?”
Kendra was cheerfully and unapologetically nosy.
“I’m trying to figure out how to write a description that will get the right next art director to apply.”
Kendra zoomed in and sat down on the couch next to Allie. “Let me see.”
“Well, there are the notes from interviews with our art directors, previous job descriptions we’ve posted, and a couple from competitors.”
“You’ve highlighted them.”
“Yes.” Duh.
“Well, let’s start making stickies!”
“What?”
“It’s just like playtesting! You’ve done the research, now it’s time for synthesis.”
“I don’t want to keep you from your work.”
“Oh, I’m brain-dead anyway. This is much more fun.”
Kendra grabbed a pad of Post-Its. “You have to make the information modular so you can find the hidden patterns. Copy the stuff you highlighted onto the Post-Its. ONE idea per Post-It. Just one! Modular!”
Why not, Allie thought. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my staring. She started copying the highlights onto Post-Its. It was mindless, but she was also eating cheese and drinking wine, and it wasn’t unpleasant.
“K, you done?” Kendra looked over. Yes, her glass was empty. She filled it back up. And the highlights from the pages were all in a pile of Post-Its.
“Let’s get it on the wall!” Kendra erased the whiteboard where it said, “Do not erase,” with a date from three weeks ago. “If they haven’t documented by now, it’s too darn late!” she chirped.
She turned to Allie. “Now we put up the Post-Its, putting like with like. Oh, thank heavens your handwriting is legible. I forgot to say.”
She started sticking the notes to the board.
“How are we doing this? I mean, is there a methodology?” Allie asked.
“We don’t know what the data has to say, so we just follow our gut. Get it up here where we can see it, put like with like, find the patterns.”
“Very game-like,” Allie commented.
“Yep! Fun!”
Allie easily found “Photoshop” and added a couple other software programs that had been mentioned. She placed “Works well with product team” with “Understands creative process.”
“What the hell is ‘Gestalt’?”
“Design philosophy,” Kendra replied.
“Thanks for sticking around. That would have driven me crazy.”
“Oh, you’d have Googled it, I’m sure.” Kendra was swiftly combining Post-Its with the calm efficiency of a master at jigsaw puzzles.
“What am I going to do with ‘Nice’?”
“Put it with ‘Ass-kicker.’”
“Really?”
“Personality traits?”
“K.”
They slowed down and Kendra stepped back. Allie followed, curious.
“Okay, what do we see?”
“That grouping is pretty big.”
“Yeah, too big. It’s the messy stuff. Personality and knowledge. And miscellanies. And that group is pretty small.” She pointed to a list of companies.
“Relevant experience.”
“Hmm . . .” Kendra paused. “Any missing?”
“It’s pretty Bay Area centric. I’d like to see more companies outside the area. Throw Hurricane in the mix. They know community and social dynamics. And Carms, and Super8.”
“When you see big groups and small groups, look closely,” Kendra lectured. “Big groups often need to be broken up, small groups expanded.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“This is just like making personas. We’re creating an art director persona!”
Allie looked out the glass wall of the conference room at the wall that held QuiltWorld’s personas. “You’re right. We’re collecting and selecting the characteristics we think matter to decision making.”
“So, any of these worth tossing out? Any less relevant?”
“Oh, yes. I’m not buying most of the personality pile. ‘Nice’? I don’t even know what to do with that.”
“But what about ass-kicker? You have to hold people to deadlines.”
“That’s covered over here, delivery focused.”
“Okay.” Kendra pulled out the pile of “personality” Post-Its and they flipped through them until they were certain they had the actionable insights. Allie’s favorite was ”Unflappable.”
They looked at the board again.
“Is everything equally important?” Kendra asked.
Allie picked up a whiteboard marker.
“These soft skills: Leads, prioritizes. Respect. Communication.” She circled the soft skills cluster. “Art director is a player-coach position. Whoever takes this role, they have to be able to deliver work as well as manage. Not only because we need good work, but because the art team needs to respect the role.” Allie stopped to chew the marker cap, another habit she thought she had broken. “I think this is the most important one. It’s things they know. Experience. Knowledge. I want someone who has dealt with these issues before. Bad enough I’m new to half of them.”
Kendra stared at the wall. “Huh. It looks like a canvas.”
“What do you mean?” asked Allie.
“You know, like the business-model canvas. Or an empathy map.”
Allie had worked with both, the empathy map more recently in a game creation session. Canvases, as far as she could figure out, were visual worksheets to help you fill in your ideas about something, like a business or a player. The empathy map always helped her to remember to consider sound design, which she had a tendency to forget, because it had a “hear” section.
“Okay, so we have a hiring canvas?”
“Or maybe a role canvas?” Kendra waved the whiteboard marker around the Post-Its, drawing in the air. Then she turned to the other wall, where a whiteboard was covered with utterly mysterious scribbles. She started to erase.
“Are you sure that’s okay?”
“No date, no keep.” Studio policy was to date all whiteboard drawings and write “Do not erase” if you wanted to keep working with it. This drawing didn’t have either.
“Okay, how about this?” She put a person in the middle of her drawing. She always did—she said if she was designing for people, people should be in the picture.
“There!” Kendra said. “You can now use that to brainstorm the other roles you’re hiring.”
Allie looked at it. It looked like an empathy map, with a person in the middle, and the head, heart, hands model instead of see, think, do . . . knowledge, hard skills, soft skills. “What about results?”
Kendra looked at her. “What about them?”
“You know, revenue, hitting your objectives.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to use OKRs for performance reviews.” Kendra looked at her suspiciously.
“Hmm. If a performance review was based on whether or not people achieved their goals, people tended to set lower goals. On the other hand . . . we need to know if they can hit the goals we’re hiring them to achieve. What is the point of OKRs if you don’t make them at least sometimes?”
Kendra contemplated that for a moment. “It does seem important to determine if a candidate is capable of achieving a goal.” She placed a slice of cheese on a cracker and ate, staring at the whiteboard. “Christie always said that when we interview, we shouldn’t ask what would you do if faced with a dilemma, but in the past, did you experience that problem and what did you do?”
Allie looked at her, confused. Maybe it was the wine.
Kendra drew two boxes under her diagram and labeled one “Past” and one “Future.” 
“Okay, so let’s say you want the person to do something, right? Like . . . ?”
“Create a safe workplace for creative work.”
Kendra smiled at that. “Okay. So how would you find out if they could do that, using the phrase ‘Tell me about a time when . . . ?’”
Allie grinned mischievously. “Tell me about a time when you had to shelter your team from demanding product managers so they could get work done.”
Kendra nodded, and poured herself a glass of wine. “Exactly.”
“So, we’ll fill in the right with what we want them to be able to do, then put questions in the left.”
“Okay. You’re still missing goals. And it looks kinda weird, the circle and the box and all. It looks like soft skills has something to do with the past?”
Kendra rolled her eyes. “Everyone’s a critic!”
“Can we make it simpler? How about . . .” Allie drew a simple four square on the white board, like the one she used every week in the OKR meeting. She began to write in what she wanted, as a test. It worked.
“So boring.”
“But easy to draw, so I use it in conversation. I can write the questions here, on the left.”
“Actually…it’s like a pyramid. You need someone to make a goal and fulfill responsibilities, right, which means they have to have skills and knowledge, therefore you want to ask these questions. . . .”
“Except there is no room to write anything at the top.”
“Okay. I can see that.” Kendra replied. “How about . . .” She erased part of Allie’s drawing and added a new section.
“I can work with that.” Allie liked it.
“It’s kind of boring.” Kendra sighed.
“Let’s test it.” Allie wrote down the goal and responsibilities of the art director. Then she grabbed the stickie notes with the job qualities that matched and stuck them in “Skills and Knowledge.” She tapped her lips with an index finger thoughtfully. “Tell me about a time when . . . you dealt with timelines being cut in half.”
“That’s a good question,” Kendra replied. “Tragically, it’s a key skillset.”
“I think we’ve got something!” Allie liked it. It all made sense.
“I’ll cut you in when my bestselling business book is out.”
“Ha! If only!” She’d settle for a decent hire.
