GI Career Fair: Search for a Star
Headstrong, Relentless and Aardvark Swift on what they look for to find the next programming superstar
Aardvark Swift
Established in 1989, Aardvark Swift has since evolved to become Europe's market leading specialist recruitment...
The latest video from the GamesIndustry.biz Career Fair focuses on the Search for a Star competition - an annual event aimed at final year students to help them find a programming job in the games industry, organised in conjunction with recruitment firm Aardvark Swift.
The competition replicates the recruitment process and includes professional advice from Lizi Attwood, lead programmer at Relentless, and Greg Booker, technical director for Headstrong Games. Here they discuss the technical requirements that helps them filter out the first of the 90-plus participants, details of the written test and common mistakes, the code-writing process which involves bug fixing and adding particular features, and finally the panel interview which includes technical coding questions.
Personally I always look for demos. If someone turns up with a decent demo they've put together, either a tech demo or game demo - just something to show what they can do - this makes a huge difference.
Trying to find out if someone is great is very difficult from a piece of paper, or even face to face, especially if they have little or no commercial experience.
Posted:A year ago