Improving Talent Acquisition in the Gaming Industry With Jon Wolheim

February 27, 2024

Improving Talent Acquisition in the Gaming Industry With Jon Wolheim

Jon Wolheim is the Volunteer Vice President of People and Culture at Games For Love, a nonprofit providing video games in children's hospitals and helping medical professionals to meaningfully integrate games into therapies. Jon's education runs through Stanford, USC, and MIT, where he got his start in core Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, ahead of leading some of the largest global HR and hiring teams at Apple and Amazon. Beyond being a top voice on LinkedIn, Jon is a competitive keynote speaker, a highly vocal advocate within the LGBTQ community, and a passionate voice for games and the brilliant minds who make them.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Jon Wolheim discusses Games For Love and its mission
Volunteer opportunities at Games For Love
How did Jon start his career in gaming?
Enhancing work-life balance and flexibility within the gaming industry
Jon's strategy for minimizing time to hire
Eliminating bias in hiring processes to foster diversity and inclusion
The importance of improving workplace dynamics, employee treatment, and retention strategies
Jon elaborates on integrating his AI certification into his recruiting practices

In this episode…

In the ever-evolving gaming industry, acquiring talent is paramount for success. What are some valuable insights into optimizing the talent acquisition process to cultivate a vibrant gaming community?

With extensive experience as a recruiter in the gaming industry, Jon Wolheim has witnessed firsthand its evolution. To foster a thriving community, he emphasizes the importance of streamlining hiring processes, promoting diversity and inclusion, and fostering positive workplace dynamics. By actively addressing biases in hiring practices and prioritizing supportive environments alongside retention strategies, gaming companies can establish inclusive workplaces that drive innovation within the industry.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, where Lizzie Mintus hosts Jon Wolheim, Volunteer Vice President of People and Culture at Games For Love, to explore recruiting practices in the gaming industry and the mission of Games For Love. Jon highlights volunteer opportunities within the organization, pathways to kickstart a career in gaming, methods for streamlining the hiring process, and approaches to fostering diversity and inclusion in recruitment.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not.

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs.

Today we have Jon Wolheim with us. Jon is a volunteer vice president of people and culture with Games for Love, a non profit that does one thing: placing video games in children's hospitals and helping medical professionals to meaningfully integrate games into therapies. Jon's education runs through Stanford, USC, and MIT, where he got his start in Core AI and ML, ahead of leading some of the largest global HR and hiring teams at Apple and Amazon.

Jon is a competitive keynote speaker, a highly vocal advocate within the LGBTQ community, and a passionate voice for games and the brilliant minds who make them, which means you, he is also a top voice on LinkedIn. Congratulations. Let's get started. Thanks for being here. Glad to connect with you.

Jon Wolheim: Thank you so much for having me. You mentioned that the guests are supposed to add value. That's a high bar to set so I hope that I come even close to it, but thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you. I always watch your content, love this podcast, honored to be here and to share a little bit about what we do over at Games for Love.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. I'm sure you'll do really well because you are a competitive speaker.

Jon Wolheim: I love that you, the emphasis on competitive. I feel like now I have to like really gun it, but okay. Awesome.

Lizzie Mintus: No pressure. Can you start by sharing a little bit about Games for Love?

Jon Wolheim: Yeah, absolutely. You could not have more elegantly and completely summed up what we do in that little tagline right there. To just reiterate, we put video games into children's hospitals and then we help the medical professionals there understand how to use those games meaningfully. So there are amazing nonprofits out there doing very similar work to what we do. And honestly, that's awesome. The more the merrier. Until every kid in every hospital has the ability to stay connected to their family, to think more about play than pain and to heal better because they feel better, until every kid has that there aren't enough nonprofits doing this. So it's fantastic.

Where we move a little bit differently within that sphere is actually connecting with those health care professionals to avoid the scenario where maybe an Xbox and a TV on a cart goes into a hospital, and then it goes into a dusty closet because maybe there wasn't the education to help somebody understand why a kid should have access to it. Or even in some cases a stigma around games, which anybody in the industry is probably painfully aware of the fact that sometimes we can be seen as, maybe, folks that aren't creating the most value, even though if and you played, it's just so important that kids have the ability to disconnect. So that's what we do. We also have a robust volunteering program, which I'm sure we'll chat about later that helps people from specifically underrepresented communities within the world find doors into gaming careers.

Lizzie Mintus: I would love to hear more about that. Can you first tell me, since you've been at Games for Love, I'm sure there are so many heartwarming stories. Like that's all you do, you warm hearts, but is there anything that really stands out as a highlight for you?

Jon Wolheim: Yeah. So about 90 percent of our revenue comes from charity streamers. And this is almost entirely on Twitch, though YouTube and Kick are slowly growing. But the vast majority of our operating revenue that we use to place games and hospitals comes from charity streamers. And I've been here for now eight months and having had the amazing good fortune to go to TwitchCon and BlizzCon and a couple of other in person events, I thought that we would be spreading the word, helping people understand like the way that I attended hiring events and college recruiting events as part of Amazon or Apple. But what I found that was so amazing and really inspiring was how often the streamers really make what we do possible would come up and tell stories about what they would hear. Because they're the most visible part of this thing.

They're out here in some cases with hundreds of thousands of people seeing them in a given day generating thousands and thousands of dollars, even in the space of a couple of hours in many cases. And so they end up hearing the stories. We really enjoy learning about those.

We have a streamer who just started with us named the Bunten, that's T H E B U N T E N on Twitch. Please subscribe to her. And she was sharing how she generated $2,100 for Games for Love in the space of just a few hours. Some of the stories that people shared there about being in chemotherapy for months, kids with organ transplants, where they were in intensive care units for years in some cases, and even folks with genetic disabilities and genetic conditions that resulted in chronically needing to be in hospitals. Those stories just came through and it was really amazing talking with her and learning about what that meant to her as a streamer. Because we hear the stories about the kids. We hear the stories from the hospitals, but when we get to really understand how something that we're doing is affecting, not just exactly who we're working with, but also the people that are giving of their time, of their energy, of their joy to be part of this, that for me, since you asked about what inspired me, that would be the one that really sticks out to me.

Lizzie Mintus: That's sweet. I'm happy that you're doing that and you're the perfect person to showcase it. I feel like you have so much visibility in the industry, you're a LinkedIn top voice, and hopefully the podcast will help boost awareness on Games for Love.

Jon Wolheim: I hope so. Come on. Anybody who's listening, please join us, gamesforlove.org. All kinds of opportunities to volunteer, of course, to donate, and we got some pretty sweet merch. I'm not going to lie.

Lizzie Mintus: And you have Jack Black.

Jon Wolheim: That's right. Yeah. So right now we're running this amazing campaign called Winter for Love. And there's two reasons why we're doing this. Simultaneously, we were approached by two incredible entities with whom we've always wanted to work. It coalesced into this thing that we're calling Winter for Love, where we're giving away tons of chairs, tons of custom computers, tons of hardware peripherals, and signed merchandise by Jack Black, including a Bowser backpack, which is very sought after. I'm asking myself, how much should I donate it to get that.

Yeah, you

Lizzie Mintus: should definitely try and get it

Jon Wolheim: Boost it. But the Jack Black is one of those entities. Now he is a known streamer. If anybody hasn't watched Jack on Twitch, he's phenomenal. He is one of the best streamers I've ever seen, which isn't a surprise because he's a born entertainer. Yeah, super engaging, super authentic. And that's what, for me anyway, what creator world is all about.

The other entity was Blizzard Entertainment, who actually donated all of their secret lab chairs. I liked it so much. I ended up ordering one myself. It's this one right here. You can see it's got the horde logo on it. They had about 200 of those chairs at Blizzcon. And so I flew down from Northern California to Blizzcon and drove a semi full of those chairs back up. And we are now giving those away through our charity streams, and it's generating hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the course of the next five years, we estimate that some 7 million kids will be positively impacted by their donation as a result of what happened that day.

And with Jack even further magnifying that. We hope to reach 30 million, which would be all of the hospitalized kids for nearly an entire year in the United States. So that's the magnitude of impact that these entities have had in the level of gratitude that we have is impossible to express without becoming emotional on a podcast, which I'm not going to do today.

I'm just not going to do it. Let's just dive in. You're like, no, do it.

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me a bit about how you got into the game industry.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah, so there's the story that we probably all share to some extent, which is how we started to play. It's a lot easier to start playing a game than it is to start working in gaming.

If anybody here is trying to work in gaming, first of all, hopefully you work with amazing humans like Lizzie and they can unlock that door for you, whether you're the entity that's hired or the entity that wants to get the jobs. But I started out playing games as a kid. I grew up in a very small town in Northern California called Paradise, California, and then shared split time between that and Long Island where my big Jewish family lives. My dad was a trucker and that is not a world that generates a lot of income. We did not have a lot of money. I would basically travel around with my dad, would work with him. And I would use the money that I made moving boxes around with him to buy video games.

And that was such an important part of my life as a kid. That's how I connected with my friends. This was long before multiplayer really existed other than sitting next to somebody and playing Mortal Kombat or the three player Secret of Mana, which of course blew everyone's minds for a hot minute there.

Games were very important to me as a kid, because there weren't just a thing to do, they were playable stories that were almost, in some cases, especially with franchises like Final Fantasy, were almost a mythology of sorts to me as a kid. That's how I started to understand story in the world, how I started to understand my role in the world as I saw characters that, as I began to understand my own self more. I saw myself there, which is why I so firmly believe in representation and radical inclusion, inclusive game design, because I benefited so significantly from seeing myself in characters for the first time in games.

And so then the professionally, right around the time I joined Apple, I got to start to work with the games teams. And most of my work for the past 45 years- yeah, that's right. It's a very long time, which means I'm very old. But I was immediately supporting the games team because I had a chance to do that. And that hiring where I got to help build those teams from a leadership standpoint was so exciting for me.

Same thing at Amazon, getting to be during getting to be at Amazon during the pandemic, which not only, of course, was massive growth for Amazon as a company, but for the games team, it was not just the normal 2x that most people saw. It was a 4 and 5x in some cases, as they very publicly share. So it was all of the excitement of a challenge that you might actually play in a game combined with contributing to the industry in a way that I was really excited to do.

And left from there, went to a voice AI company that actually creates a lot of the technology called SoundHound AI that powers a lot of the voice AI in games, the natural language processing and automatic speech recognition. ASR and NLP that drives so much of the AI and ML stuff that's happening behind the scenes when we're playing games.

What's interesting though, Lizzie, to your question, have I ever worked for Blizzard? Have I ever worked for Nintendo or PlayStation or Xbox or Square Enix or any studio? No, never actually been working directly in the industry.

Jon Wolheim: And so for me, when our first baby came into our lives, and I was able to, because of being part of that startup, step away for a first time and actually be part of this little one's life. It was also a unique opportunity for me to choose how to most meaningfully participate in this industry that I love so much and that I truly believe is a factor of good in this world. And that for me was Games for Love. So as not to run the risk of beleaguering and going too long on one answer, that's my circuitous and somewhat tangential route through and around and now toward gaming.

Lizzie Mintus: Great. I'm glad you can spend time with your kid. That's the most important thing. I started here as Waldo when I was five months pregnant because I thought, it's funny to even say, I thought I would have a very flexible schedule, which I do. But I thought I'd have a lot more free time, but jokes on me. I just work all the time. At least I work on my own schedule and I'm my own boss and I'm not commuting into an office and driving an hour each way. I can be with my kids during the day. I just work a lot as well. It's important.

Jon Wolheim: Flexibility though.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, no, flexibility is priceless. And when I was building my company, the first person I hired, it was during COVID. And she had a five year old. And she was homeschooling him, because that's what you were doing. So she'd work odd hours, but she did the best work. She's an amazing person. And I trusted her. And I don't care when you work. I don't care what you do. You have to take care of your kid and do school. That's probably the most important thing you're doing. And if you can work more, or you can work less. That's great. That's fine. Obviously, times have changed, but I think that's so important. A lot of people have discovered how important that is through the pandemic.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah. Yeah. Especially as we talk about so many terms turn around now- future of work, workplace, destiny, whatever we want to call it, where it's all about whether people are going into offices or not. I don't know if we all before pandemic lockdown had caused to so meaningfully weigh the remote work slash otherwise just freedom of choosing where you work even when that we had during that time. Genie certainly out of the bottle there.

For anybody listening to this podcast through the lens of I want to get a job in games, if you're on LinkedIn you've probably already heard about Amir Satvat's games resources. Please come and join us. I'm so lucky to be a volunteer mentor with that resource. I bring it up because we are often talking about how to forge your destiny, how to make your path, how to choose on your little compass, which direction to go in when there's infinite angles, especially within games, despite layoffs that have happened a lot in 2023. Still growing at a 13.4 percent category, which is a growth rate that is pretty staggering for any industry. And now it's so cool that games, in my experience, in one person's observation, is one of the most vibrant environments for flexibility and remote work, which is pro family, it is pro diversity, it is pro equity, it is pro inclusion, it is pro so many things, it's just anti old CEOs. We don't need any more of those. We have so many of those. We don't need more.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it is. I wouldn't be able to be a mom and have a kid and live my life. Definitely. And I talk to CEOs about that all the time. Okay, you say you want diversity. First of all, do you really? And second of all, how are you going to offer flexible work or how are you going to make an inclusive environment?

I want to talk to you about hiring because you have so much experience hiring at Amazon, hiring in Apple. I read some stats. You reduce time to hire by 78%. Yes to this. I would love to share both from what companies can do and what candidates can do in the process. Maybe we can start with companies reducing time to hire is a big one. How did you accomplish that?

Jon Wolheim: Time to hire and cost to hire are not the same metric, but they're impossible to disconnect. You can't bifurcate those two things. You can look at them and measure them individually, but at the end of the day, one drives the other, mostly time to hire driving cost to hire, especially when you include opportunity costs or cost of absence. For anybody listening to this, these are maybe obscure terms for anybody outside of the sort of inside baseball HR conversation.

Time to hire, of course, means from the time a job is open, to the time that job is filled. And that is typically measured in days. And cost of hire is the actual total all in cost of hiring that person. That typically includes the cost of the recruiting teams, all associated marketing budgets. In some cases, you can even roll in the facilities costs so you have a true measure of what did it cost us to get this person. When you add to that opportunity costs, like this job generates $100,000 a month of profit. Or $500,000 a month of revenue, you could stop and say, okay, if we add what it costs us to not have this person here for two months, and you're looking purely at revenue, you would say this is a million dollar opportunity cost for this person to be gone for two months. That's just an extreme example.

Lizzie Mintus: It's true though. And I think a lot of people don't always think about that.

Jon Wolheim: So if you mentioned talking with CEOs. And I promise to come right back around to your actual question, which is how to actually do this stuff, hopefully that helps set a little bit of a stage. I'm sure anybody who listens to you consistently, Lizzie already had that information and they're like, thank you for that. You just hit fast forward, 45 seconds ago. But the reality is that a lot of CEOs or stakeholders are a little bit more in my experience are too disconnected from the actual ground floor operations to understand the actual cost to their business. I would imagine that your expression right now, Lizzie might be the one that I often have, which is some form of like, how am I explaining this? When this person is ultimately responsible for the operations of the business, right?

Lizzie Mintus: The other thing that is a disconnect is like, Hey, you don't like any of these five people, but in order to find these five people, we had to take 20 interviews. I'm just making these numbers up. And we had to reach out to 2000 people. This is a very bad example. I think people don't actually understand the pool and they don't understand what the market's saying. And they don't understand that 52 candidates said that they don't want to work in the office in the location in which your job is for. You only now have whatever percent of the market. You only have 5 percent of the available market because of your location constraint. Not to go off, but this is my life.

Jon Wolheim: No, any recruiters, especially recruiters who have like direct interface with executive stakeholders, we should probably give it like a trigger warning for them right now. This is, oh man, I feel my cortisol levels are like spiking. The amazing thing is penny wise, pound foolish. It's amazing how often you'll see it. Maybe you've had this experience too. But it's amazing how often I've seen huge investment in hiring teams, huge investment in hiring initiatives and sometimes even that last $10,000 of wage range to close the deal is the sticking point. There's reasons for that, right? Sometimes there's really good reasons for towing the line and drawing a line in the sand. But by and large, to come back around to your question, you actually touched right on what my biggest answer would be.

Of course, there's so much nuance. You said candidates said that they wanted X. And in my experience, if I could only give one answer to this. It's listening, creating surveying tools, many of which are automated. We live in an era where there's so many wonderful surveying, even something simple like Google forms or the simplest survey monkey you can possibly, the most basic template. It starts to give you data that can give you directional clarity into understanding what's really happening.

Because the number of times that I've come into a team, seeing that their average time to fill is in the hundreds of days, everybody's unhappy. The recruiters are performing poorly. They're getting bad feedback. The executives are starving for talent. They're missing KPIs. Their objectives are falling through. The brand is a small enough team or company, the brand itself could be starting to falter. And all largely because there's probably some big X factor that nobody's really asking the right questions about. Maybe it's workplace flexibility. Maybe it's a culture of inclusion. Maybe it's pay transparency. If you're not asking these questions and you're not doing so, I believe, through the lens of inclusion, all you're costing yourself is your business. And that's just the simple, in my experience, the simple fact of the matter. Using surveying tools to ask, how are we performing within demographics. Using surveying tools to ask, what could we be doing to improve these ratios, use your pasture ratios, right?

I see myself walking toward the whiteboard here so I'm going to stop, but I could not agree with you more around. It's so vexing sometimes how we can be so penny wise and pound foolish when it comes to our hiring initiatives. And I believe the answer to that is listening.

Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. I think your team also has to be on the same page with your hiring objectives. I see that a lot because if there is disconnect on how you are going to determine if someone's the right fit or not, or maybe you don't even have a job description and different people have completely different interpretations of the job, you ultimately cannot hire somebody. So it's so worth the time up front to figure out all of these things at the beginning. Also, if you're going to have a test in your interview process, you should make that for the candidate needs it. That's another hot tip.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah. Yeah. And let's say somebody is endeavoring to hire and they're maybe not at a big company because there's probably somebody with the title that sounds like HR business partner or recruiter or talent acquisition leader, who's probably going to be the champion to not do something like this, but going into a hiring process where you don't have a clear understanding of what great looks like is among the single largest factors in creating environments bias. When you're basically saying, Hey, do you like this person? You're really asking which of your biases are you indexing on right now to assess this person's qualification and the would you have a beer with this person *locker room culture*? Would you hang out with this person? All you're really asking is, are you familiar with where this person's from? And are they likely from your community? And if you already have an environment where there isn't a lot of diversity and there isn't an inclusive approach, all you're doing is perpetuating that. And if you've got even just one person in the mix, who's trying to fix that, you're probably gonna have a process that's going to last weeks, if not months or years.

Lizzie Mintus: It's very true. So what can companies do to make a more inclusive, let's just start with hiring process and remove bias.

Jon Wolheim: I believe it really starts with a commitment to knowing that you're going to navigate some waters you're not familiar with, right? So I think it's a culture of curiosity and understanding. Question comes along in my experience, while leading HR teams. Too often, this question comes along when you're looking at some report or worse, the news, and you've been outed as having a 10 percent female representation in your entire company or that 55 percentof your attrition was people of color or BIPOC individuals. And this happens so much. This happens all the time. And if that's when a company is actually coming to terms with this. That's tough. Honestly, you're really talking about how you should improve your lifestyle after a heart attack.

Now, if somebody is in that setting, what do you do? Very similar to starting from a more holistic approach long before the problem happened. And that's really honestly great contracting conversations and defining what you're looking for. In my experience, there's a lot of answers to this question, but I think that having contracting conversations where everybody is aligned and on the same page and understanding that, are we going to implement tools like the Rooney Rule, where if we don't have a certain level of representation across the spectrum of demographics, we don't engage in the next step in the process.

There's a lot of feelings about this particular approach, but there's many out there that essentially give you a framework through which to make sure that you're reaching certain points of inclusion. Some of which are very objective like that. Others of which are more subjective, like using resources and working with your employee resource groups, your employee affinity groups- to even ask, Hey, what does our hiring process look like? Hey, what do you think of this job description? Would you mind if we were to have a sort of group within that employee resource group that could routinely weigh in and even experience our hiring process from the complete start to tell us where are we using terms that maybe aren't as inclusive, where are we completely missing the ball with geography?

When I've done that in the past, I've been blown away with how obvious some of these answers were. You just walk right past it. It's like the thing in your house that you don't even think to clean until somebody walks in and says, wow, how dirty is that corner? And you're like, I've walked past that 100 times. It starts with listening. And then having those contracting conversations to say, especially with more seasoned leaders, maybe folks who've been in the industry for a while where they don't come from a generation where the value and critical importance is of cultivating a diverse and inclusive culture and an employee base isn't fully realized.

I think having those contracting conversations are so vital to make sure people understand this is how we're going about it. Here's why this is not just some arbitrary thing we're doing because it seems good and sounds nice. This is not a marketing play. This is not just the right thing to do for people. This is the right thing to do for our business because we make better stuff when we connect better and understand more of the people that we're serving.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. If your user base is 50%. Women are people of color and you are a 50 white man, how are you going to make a game for them? Or worse, there's a good story about this company that made games for women, but it was made 100 percent by men and the game tanked obviously, right?

Jon Wolheim: Oh no, this is that subreddit, men writing women, if you've ever seen that subreddit. It so painfully and perfectly encapsulates exactly what you just described. I'm not going to recite a single word from that subreddit right now, but oh, it's rough.

Lizzie Mintus: I bet. A lot of people think about diversity hiring, hopefully, and make some efforts there. But like you touched on, there's a lot of attrition of women and people of color, or they can be at companies, if there are not the right mechanisms to support them. And I think, the conversation should not just be, how can we attract these people, but how can we hire a diverse workforce and make sure everybody feels safe and supported at work once we hire them?

Jon Wolheim: Boy, the power of the exit interview and identifying off ramps, I don't think can be overstated. It's been a little sad to see in this sort of perceived recessionary period. And I say that because the economy in the, over the course of the last few years has been so far beyond stellar in terms of anybody's definition. Even the most pessimistic estimator can't look at what's happened these last few years and say anything other than, wow. And yet still many organizations take this two to three or somewhat mid sighted approach and say, we better stay lean. We better stay agile. We should probably do layoffs now before we have to do big ones later. I'm not judging entities that are doing that. Just stating an objective fact.

However, I've seen some really disturbing data from Deloitte, KPMG, BCG, some of these larger consulting groups that publish these industry analyses. And they're looking at talent shift and many of the layoffs that have happened, particularly in games, have far disproportionately affected already underrepresented and somewhat criminally under resourced groups. I saw an estimate the other day that 36 percent of people laid off in the state of California, within the games industry were female or female identifying. And in a world where there's still approximately 17 percent representation, you cannot see anything other than disproportionate impact there.

That's certainly disparate impact, to use an HR term that any HR reps here would be familiar with. So how do we fix that, right? Okay, let's, I'm bemoaning this data. Think about the off ramps, right? So do the exit surveys. Easy to look at comp, always easy to look at compensation. And if you're not paying competitively, then you are, of course, going to attrit faster than your competition. But there's really like black and white, such face value, how are we looking past this like parental leave? We do still live in a country where federally a company is only required to provide two weeks off, unpaid, in the United States. Short of a soapbox rant, that sounds like a political speech. I'll simply say that the impact that has on families, particularly families that don't have a lot of resources. Is a criminal understatement to say terrible. It is super bad.

So many companies serve to address this, right? Private industry provides, Google between 12 and 16 weeks of parental leave. Many other companies are in a similar sort of space. Apple notably as well. Smaller studios maybe don't always have that. I want to call out 2k and their subsidiary Rockstar. They have some of the best parental benefits that you can find, including parental leave which has blown me away, which is recently within the mentoring community.

We're celebrating somebody successfully moving into a director role with 2k and they were sharing their experience. The benefits that I heard about were blowing my mind. Here's the thing. That person identifies as female. They had frozen their eggs about five years ago, and this job is why they get to have a family.

I'm gonna say that again. This job at 2k is why they're going to get to have a family. Should it be that way? No. Is it that way? Yes. 2k probably has somebody who's going to stay there for the rest of their lives. Yeah, because they unlocked something that's way more important than money, way more important than almost any other aspect of how some people might frame their lives. I would certainly say that it's true of me. And if it wasn't for that benefit for that person, they wouldn't be able to have their little kiddos like they're now actively going to do. That's one, parental leave is huge. And all the other off ramps, is there a culture of bias where people can't get promoted and so they have to leave to progress in their careers. And is that disproportionately affecting people of color? Look at the data folks. The answer is probably yes. If you're seeing that 10 percent of your employee base is one group and 25 percent of your attrition is that group. There's a problem.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, absolutely. Those are good points. And I didn't know that about 2k. That's so wonderful. I listened to a woman who owns a company called Molly Maid, which is this cleaning chain. And she is a CEO. And she spoke about how she thinks about ways she can go above and beyond for her employees. I listened to her right when I started my business. She has people clean houses, they're her employees. And she was asking them about their dreams and what the most important things are for them. And one woman said her dream was to get on a plane because she'd never gotten on a plane and fly to go see her family in some other state that was close by. So this lady made her dream come true as a bonus and bought her this flight and she said she cried like she will always be with her. Not always, but she'll be with her for a long time because that's just so meaningful. That's just so sweet, right? So I think companies can think about how they can provide meaning to their employees in not monetary ways, because people have different motivations, but everybody wants parental leave.

Jon Wolheim: Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: That's just like a statement.

Jon Wolheim: It's just so like brass tacks. So elemental and it's not just the female identifying or birthing partner who benefits from this, right? If you've had kids, Lizzie, it sounds like you may have, right? You know that if your partner isn't there, it's not like there's net the same amount of work. If everybody is working right, everybody's busy. If that person is not there at 3 a. m., it's just you waking up and then you have to get up again at 6 to feed and so on and so forth. So having everybody available to be there is just so valuable. And that's so cool about Molly Maids. That's great to hear. I see them all over the place in Northern California.

Lizzie Mintus: There you go. Maybe you should have them clean your house.

Jon Wolheim: Definitely want to support them now for sure.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but I think that's also meaningful for meaningful from a business standpoint. And I think through the pandemic, maybe in the more recent years, people really do want to work for a company that aligns with their personal values. That's more and more of a consideration.

Jon Wolheim: It's interesting too, because you see this sort of tectonic splitting of these big factors in employment, which is a purpose and mission driven, largely millennial Gen Z increasing, not just demand for, but absolute unflinching requirement for meaning and purpose. Like I'm not just going to turn the wheel on this machine for 40 years and then hopefully still have functional knees to go on cruises for a couple decades and then kick the bucket. That sell is done nobody is signing up for that. I know I'm not anymore anyway.

And then on the other hand, you've got this sort of increasing requirement for people coming to the office and a sort of appetite for, unfortunately, even DEI programs that are starting to fade away in some cases. Gosh, even just the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action was very formative in a lot of company policies. So it's really interesting to see this tectonic shift.

I think that the more people make it clear that companies, if you want to have a future, you're going to need to employ people in the future. AI is not going to do everybody's job for a long time. So you're going to need these humans. So you better start thinking about how you can create a clear path toward doing meaningful work for every single person in your company. And if you aren't telling people why they're doing what they're doing and how it's impacting the success of that brand, you're probably losing. So for any executives out there, that's one person's strong belief on how you can differentiate your talent brand.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's authentic. And people really love that. I think the power dynamic has really just shifted to. I heard so much about quiet quitting. Quiet quitting was all the rage a year and a half ago. You'd hear a lot about it. And now people are scared that they're going to be laid off and they're feeling grateful to have a job and they have to go into the office or they have to do these things that if they were told they had to do mid pandemic when it whatever it was safe to go back to work they would have told their employer to kick rocks and that they would quit and their employer would have let them continue to do work remotely or you know whatever. The power dynamic always changes but it's really important when you're a candidate or when you're a company to remain respectful and have integrity and have purpose and treat everyone really well because things will shift. It will become a candidate market again in the whatever your future, right? And if you have treated people badly when the market has been in your favor, if you're a candidate or a company, people will remember that.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah, it's not like your glass door. Like automatically update and like adjust for inflation with candidate expectations. No, I think it goes to a point on a panel that I got so lucky to be part of during the game awards. We're talking a little bit about access to jobs and the idea of a question basically came along that sounded something super cool. All these folks are sharing all this advice. Stand by your values and only do meaningful work. Cool. Also, I have a mortgage or I have rent and I got laid off. What about the vast majority of people in the world, especially in developing nations, what about people that don't have the luxury of, oh, I'm just going to hang out and do whatever I want. Tell companies to kick rocks until they do the right thing.

I think that message should be heard to your point, Lizzie, by companies who are thinking about what happens when the pendulum swings back, and it will. And quickly, by the way. These were not like decades long shifts. These things happened in the course of six months at a time. And I remember seeing mid 2020 into 2021- 22, you couldn't hire, but the demand for talent. Remember it was so crazy, right? You get five applications for an open job.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Recruiters were getting job offers sent to them without interviewing. That's when you know something is wrong.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah, it was like a Visa advertisement. There's an offer. That's neat. That's cool. Oh, sure. Why not? Yeah. It's been in that pendulum will come back. Companies, if you're looking at people as a commodity and you're thinking about that person who will have to work for you, we'll work for you because they have to understand that they won't always. And they'll remember when you could have done something right. And you didn't because you didn't have to. So do you have to support and sponsor employee resource groups? Maybe not. Do you have to think about benefits that might support disenfranchised or even underrepresented or under resourced communities? Maybe not. Do you have to have paid transparency? If you're in Colorado or California, D. C. or parts of Oregon, yeah, you do. Are you doing that because you have to, or are you doing it because it's the right thing to do and you want to create that? I believe that every single penny and minute you spend considering how to make things better for your people will pay the biggest dividends of anything else, more than your product, more than your brand, more than even how you're investing dividends with stakeholders or shareholders. Your people will always be your biggest cost and your biggest variable. If you're not making it good for them, you won't be able to hire them and you certainly won't be able to keep them.

Lizzie Mintus: And you won't be able to make a good product because people are not really doing their best work. I think it connects with your game, right? Is your game fun to play? Are people having fun at work? Do they like the job? That's definitely all connected.

I want to talk about the AI certification that you got and your thoughts on AI in games, your thoughts on AI and recruiting or being a job seeker.

Jon Wolheim: Yeah I'm actually an AI generated image. So it's actually, it's great. Oh boy. So this is the biggest one, right? And the biggest question in the world right now is, what does AI mean? I have a friend named John, who actually ran all the talent at Apple while I was there. He and I actually took the AI MIT course together because we both had for decades bemoaned this weird disconnect in the talent space that just at least the two of us had observed, which is. I got into recruiting because I like people and inherently that means that I don't like numbers. That's a statement that I've heard in many different ways from many different people, even senior executives. I've heard vice presidents of fortune two companies say, I don't really want to look at this reporting. I want to feel my way through it a little bit more. Some version of that. That's actually a great thing to say at certain times.

In my experience, though, that does at points, create an environment where you can't see what's coming because you're not looking at the data and you're not thinking differently about how you can think differently. And that's a kind of a vexing statement, I know. But all of this is to say that right now what's happening with AI is changing how we think about what we think about. And that means that, should you write your cover letters through chat GPT exclusively? Probably not. I'm going to say a very low likelihood that you should. Should Jasper do all of your LinkedIn commenting for you? Should any of these many services- should Sonara do all of your applications for you?

I'm going to go with no on most of this.

Lizzie Mintus: Hard no from me. Not exclusively. It should help you.

Jon Wolheim: I think that's where I believe that the answer to how should I think about AI? What is the future of AI and humanities relationship? And then more granularly, how can AI play a role in my career, job search, promotion planning... It's all about inspiration. I think should be part of inspiring almost everything that we do now.

That's where I think AI should play a role. Because I've having had the chances to play with the nuts and bolts. of how some of the large learning models work and understanding a little bit about what even chat GPT now GPT four by the time people are hearing this, it's probably going to be GPT 5.5., how intelligent it is. It's all about parameters. It's all about how much data you can pull from so you can understand. I had a professor there at that MIT program who really beautifully said. The more parameters you have, the more stars are in the sky and the more constellations you can pick out.

And then that by that you can navigate more intelligently. And that's why GPT four's estimated 100 trillion parameters is so vastly superior to some of its competitors and whatever comes next could have in the orders of magnitude more than that. Particularly some of the stuff that we'll soon see coming out of certain Asian markets because of big data alliances that have been longstanding there. The more data, the more intelligent the system. Most of the same algorithms powering a lot of this stuff. It's just what data and training that you've given it.

Anyway, what does that mean for me if I'm trying to get a job right now. I would challenge people to do this. If you're ever stopping, you're not a hundred percent sure what you should do next. Try running it through AI, just to ask, right? And this does require some basic prompt education, which I think in the next 10 years is going to be a class required in high school for you to pass. How you talk to machines will soon be just as important as how you talk to people, arguably more so in some cases.

But let's say you're engineering a simple prompt. Let's go. This is like big theory. Let's draw all the way down to here's an exact prompt that I would suggest using as a jumping off point. You open up GPT four and say something like act as, by the way, start with please, because you never know when these machines are going to become sentient.

Want to be remembered as the person who is nice to them. Please act as world renowned games, recruiting expert, Lizzie Mintus. Or whoever you'd like to choose of similar qualification. We are going to work together to create a career path for me. Assume I will copy the LinkedIn copy so you can understand my background. My goals are one, two, three. You may ask me up to three questions to further improve the quality of the output. I want you to tell me three ideas on how to grow my career. And this is like starting from scratch. I don't even know what I want to do next thing. And it will research you. It will give you information relative to the industry.

You've told it to deeply think and to be a certain persona. And so it will come back and it will give you impossibly nuanced ideas. And then you push it further, right? Give me three more, but make them more tailored towards the gaming industry. And then it'll really start getting nuanced. And it's really cool.

And again, this all comes back around to how can you be inspired by as opposed to, almost dependent upon AI in this era. Learning now is probably your best investment of time because this is one of those learning curves that's more of a learning wave. If you fall too far behind, it's so hard to get back on top of the wave that you almost just get left behind. So that's a cautionary tale, perhaps is at least how I feel about it.

Lizzie Mintus: I think it's important to be curious and try out different things, but also don't lose your own voice. I think since chat GPT has become prominent, the amount of shitty emails that I get that are just absolute garbage per day has gone up like 5x. And so I think nobody wants to read your robotic garbage, right? It's a starting point. You still have to tailor it if you're going to use it for writing stuff. But yeah, idea generation is huge.

Jon Wolheim: You might like this actually. You follow Bill Young.

Lizzie Mintus: Of course, yes.

Jon Wolheim: So we actually not long ago, we're talking about AI and content generation. We were talking about how he used to be terrible at interviewing and now the new version of garbage is this AI output and we actually ended up creating this beautiful t shirt. I used to be hot garbage. This is purely just for fun. This is not for sale anywhere.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's new business.

Jon Wolheim: I only share that to say it's funny because it's right there. We were just talking about it. It's so front of mind right now, the rapidly diminishing quality of communication as we're figuring out. We're in an awkward adolescence right now. We all got a new toy. Yeah, and we're playing with it. We're trying to figure it's almost like a new game in a lot of cases. Like, how do I even play this thing? Some are getting good at it and are teaching others and that will help over time. But I got to say, if we drill that down into one piece of advice, I don't know if I would ever really click a button that says auto generate this email, particularly on LinkedIn. Because if you do that, and then 100 other people do that, all you've done is successfully become one in 100. Not a good look anymore.

Lizzie Mintus: No, it's not a good luck. It's the easy way out. But I think a lot of people take it and it's not that hard to keep your own voice and do your own thing if you're able to put in a little more effort, which is really just the secret of how to be successful in life, I think. Put in a little bit more effort to me than anybody else. Good things will come.

Jon Wolheim: Strong agree.

Lizzie Mintus: I have one last question before I ask it, I want to point people to the Games for Love website, gamesforlove. org. The last question is, who has been your biggest mentor or mentors and what advice have they given you that has stuck with you?

Jon Wolheim: Mentoring conversation, so important.

Lizzie Mintus: And now you're a mentor.

Jon Wolheim: So right now I've got two people. I firmly believe that any chapter in your life, you are really well supported by having two to three people who you would call your mentor. Honestly, even just to say that you are able to inhabit a student mindset and having that sort of the ability to put on the hat of learning is something in my experience that as I've maybe inhabited more senior roles, it gets real easy to say I'm done learning because all I do is teach. In the windows of my life where I've fallen into that trap, those are typically when I've stalled and become unhappy, honestly, because learning literally is, or learning, I should say, is actually one of the most powerful sources of dopamine that we have.

If anybody here follows Ida Figueroa, we had a chance to talk about neuroscience and gaming and the role of the amygdala and how it informs your hippocampus and how it codes memories. You remember the moments that matter because of the adrenaline, the oxytocin, the serotonin, and so on and so forth. The dopamine that's flowing. And all that is to say, you're learning. Learning is fun, and it is fun when you are learning. So that actually sounds like a weird after school special from the 80s. Learning is fun.

My mentors that I would call out are a gentleman named Steven and a person named JD and JD is a part of the talent team over at Blizzard. And it's just an amazing person, comes from the same community that I do. So understands a little bit of maybe the journey that, that I've walked. He's has been there for awhile, is influential there and as such is a wonderful sort of lens for me, not only on how I want to think about myself as hopefully a voice that somebody might ever want to listen to it all, but also understanding what it looks like to speak about inclusion when you may be the person most benefiting from it. That is something that's really important, I think, for any of us to think about, because you have to carry that carefully. So as to not sound self serving.

But my other mentors is a gentleman named Steve, who been just a fun part of my life. And it's more of a family friend slash mentor. You've got to have somebody in your life who will tell you when what you're talking about is hot garbage. You've got to have it. And Steve is that person for me. He was professor at USC. And so we share that Trojan family background. It's just awesome.

It's great working with somebody at Blizzard as well, going back to JD for a second, because of this awesome work you get to do at USC around setting up a different sort of new center for the world of games. The USC Viterbi program is the number one game development program in the world. And it's so neat to be able to start to broker these relationships. Going back to Steve, Steve is really active in the web three world. And as I started to learn about AI and ML, I found that now it was finally time for me to understand WTF is an NFT. Yeah. What is all this web three nonsense metaverse?

All these buzzwords that like immediately vanished when AI came along, remember March of 2023, all anybody was talking to NFT, this tokenize that blah, blah, blah, blah, doge coin. Maybe that was already dead by then, but now, the stuff's coming back and web three is huge and Steve and the folks over at free name. io does, that's like another kind of point of passion. If anybody wants to do some research, I believe that the next big wave in games is going to be informed by blockchain. We'll be renting items to beat dungeons at some point in the not too distant future. And that'll all be blockchain. And web three identity is, I believe going to be one of the biggest sources of wealth that we all have in the near term. Dot gaming is an example of one of those domains that just blows my mind at what those free name folks are doing over there. Twitch streamers are buying their, Lizzie dot gaming as their web three ID. So Lizzie dot gaming in any browser would take you to your link tree, take you to your Twitch page, act as your center payment, act as your blockchain ID. Or at least a wallet destination. That's really cool to see. And so Steve has also helped me understand what the heck does all that stuff mean?

So that now I actually meaningfully participate. I'm Jon dot gaming on there because somehow it was still available right after it popped. Yes, I'll use it, but one day, hopefully it'll be worth a couple bucks if I want to be a Twitch

Lizzie Mintus: streamer. This podcast doesn't come out for a couple months, so I can get Lizzie.Gaming before anybody else.

Jon Wolheim: Snap it up.

Lizzie Mintus: Priorities. We've been talking to Jon Wolheim, VP for People and Culture at Games for Love. Jon, where can people go to donate money, find out more about the volunteer programs, reach out to you?

Jon Wolheim: Gamesforlove. org is certainly the sort of central hub there. Always excited to talk with people on LinkedIn. That is the best and I believe most sort of valuable social network place. So if you'd like to learn about volunteering, come hit me up. If you'd like to hear about what's going on and be very current on some of what we're doing, particularly with volunteering programs. They can help you get into games. It's as easy as just go on and just go to my page and just follow or send me a connection request and just mention that you're interested in learning about volunteering. Always happy to help chat directly with you. That would be the two best options in any way, shape or form, any way that anybody's involved with games for life, even just watching our charity streamers.

I got to call that one out too. If you happen to sign up for our newsletter or see our socials and you see a charity streamers on, it doesn't even mean you need to donate, just simply turning them on while you're working remotely, hopefully, is meaningfully contributing to their success. And thusly that of kids in hospitals.

So it's a really easy way to be part of a story that I am proud to be part of and that I believe matters.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To capture all the latest from, Here's Waldo. You can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.

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