[eyao]

Here's my personal advice. While there are plenty of companies hiring strategies to look at to get ideas on how to accomplish getting the "best person" I would first take a step back and evaluate on what's important to you and your team and then filter based off that - be creative if you have to in order to get what you want.

While Frocer touched upon a majority of what we did, I'll throw in my interviewing experiences. We are partly in the video game industry so my #1 requirement was the applicant MUST have video game playing experience (of the 'core' variety) and the more the better. I just couldn't see anyone who only played Wii Sports or Bejeweled on the iPhone could comprehend what we do and therefore unable to help the team in any sort of discussion beyond the technical. So that was what was most important to me and that was what I filtered on and not surprisingly, I had a good feeling immediately after each interview on whether or not I wanted them.

My interview consisted of no stupid puzzles or whatever cause it was of no use to me. Show me you are technically proficient (of which a lot were, otherwise why waste time applying for the job) and then show me you understand video games by carrying an intelligent conversation with me about let's say your favorite xbox 360 game, which smash bros was the best, or why world of warcraft is both the greatest and worst game ever, etc. You'd be surprised on how many people couldn't do that.

Also I'm seconding the reference/portfolio thing. The more you can find about their past, the better the idea you will have about their future.

[blahblahblah]

I'm curious. Did you ever try hiring someone who was an occasional gamer (the Wii and Bejeweled gamer) and they didn't work out or did you just assume that they wouldn't be a valuable addition to your team and automatically exclude them? The reason I ask is because I wonder if having some diversity in the level of gameplay ability in your staff might actually produce better games (i.e. ones that mere mortals can play). Of course, I have no idea what your target market is, but its pretty clear to me that occasional gamers are a largely untapped market that the large game companies are mostly ignoring. There's no doubt that Halo, Call of Duty, WoW, etc. sell a lot of units, but there are also a lot of people (I am one of them) who have absolutely no interest in playing those kinds of games for the very simple reason that we have other things to do with our lives. We still play games, but we avoid games that require a significant time investment in order to achieve competency at gameplay. For example, I do not play first-person shooter games at all - the user interfaces are too complex to learn when you're the sort of person who only plays games for a couple of hours on Saturdays and may go for a month or more between sessions of playing any particular game. Battle for Middle Earth II is at the upper limit of interface complexity that I am willing to tolerate before I give up on a game because it seems like I'm spending more time trying to remember the mechanics of the controls than I am just having fun playing. I tend to gravitate towards simple turn-based or mouse-click slash & hack RPGs (Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Siege, Diablo II), sim games (Sid Meier's Civilization, Masters of Orion II, The Sims), and simple arcade or puzzle games (Dig Dug, Arkanoid, Minesweeper). If it takes more than a minute to relearn the controls of a game when a month has passed since the last time I played it, odds are that I'll get frustrated and stop playing that game and avoid others like it. Similarly, if the default game AI is tuned to perform at the level of a hardcore gamer and there's no way to turn it down to a level that a perpetual n00b like me can compete with, I'll ditch the game and never buy another one like it (many real-time strategy games are guilty of this offense).

[eyao]

Sorry if there was some misunderstanding - what I meant by a 'core' gamer (and I hate this term) is one who doesn't play hardcore, but someone who is familiar with and plays in the more traditional gaming industry (which is our target market). Whether they be a casual gamer or not, I don't care, but if they can discuss all those things you just did in that huge paragraph and carry a conversation with me about them then that's what I'm looking for.

The problem is, trying to talk to someone who's only knowledge of gaming is Wii and iPhone about traditional gaming tends to go nowhere in my experience, whereas talking to a traditional gamer about the Wii and iPhone still leads to interesting conversation and ideas as those "casual" games are pretty much small extensions of traditional gaming.