The Power of Networking and Fostering Relationships for Career Success with Joe Nickolls

December 26, 2023

The Power of Networking and Fostering Relationships for Career Success with Joe Nickolls

Joe Nickolls is the VP of Sumo Digital North America, a multi-genre video game platform featuring titles for major publishers, including Microsoft, Sony, Sega, and 2K. With 25 years of industry experience, he’s contributed his talents at various studios like Capcom and EA, where he led the MAXIS Studio, overseeing the Sims franchises. Joe is also the Co-founder and Managing Director of Timbre Games, a Vancouver-based company focusing on values, diversity, and inclusion, and a two-time Best Places to Work in Canada winner.

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

Joe Nickolls discusses Timbre Games and its mission
Why Timbre Games has been voted one of the best places to work in Canada
Joe describes Timbre’s hiring and talent acquisition process
#JoesImpact100: Joe shares the inspiration behind his viral LinkedIn posts
How did Joe’s career path lead him to working in the video game industry?
The significance of networking and creating relationships for job opportunities

In this episode…

Although no scientific proof backs the percentage of jobs acquired through networking, fostering relationships can lead to job opportunities. What are some practical approaches to networking?

When considering networking, most people associate it with attending industry events. However, forming connections can be as simple as reaching out to your personal and professional contacts. This is why it is vital to never burn bridges with former coworkers and managers, as you never know when those relationships may be beneficial. But, as business leader Joe Nickolls explains, it’s imperative to be open when meeting new people. While showing vulnerability to strangers can be intimidating, openly sharing your career background, knowledge, and skills can open doors to new opportunities.

Join Lizzie Mintus on this episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, where Joe Nickolls, Co-founder and Managing Director of Timbre Games, discusses how networking and relationships can influence career opportunities. Joe discusses Timbre Games’ talent acquisition process, the inspiration behind his viral #JoesImpact100 LinkedIn posts, and his journey into working in the video game industry.

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. Lizzy

Lizzie Mintus: Mintos, 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 Harris Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the video 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 Joe Nichols with us.

Joe is a games industry veteran with 25 years of experience working at studios like EA, Capcom, Microsoft, and more. He is most recently the VP and, or was most recently the VP and GM of Maxis, overseeing franchises like The Sims and SimCity. Joe is now the VP of Sumo Digital North America and a co founder of Timber Games in Vancouver.

Let's get started!

You're awesome. Tell us about Timber for anybody that may not know.

Joe Nickolls: Timber's been around for a couple of years. And we are a startup in Vancouver. It started out with three of us that decided we wanted to start something new. And really focus on things like better values diversity, inclusion, trying to make games a little bit differently and make the kind of games that we wanted to make.

Got together like I meant, like you had already mentioned, I was at Maxis. COVID hit. And and we decided, okay let's leave California and let's go back to Vancouver. Cause my kids were up here and I thought we didn't want to be a different place than the kids. And so we came back up and phoned up Jeff Coats said, you want to do a thing?

And he goes, yeah, let's do the thing. And then phoned up Zoe and we ended up doing it. So the three of us started Timber and it was three of us for a while. And then we ended up becoming part of Sumo digital. They were we were partnered with a a company in Oregon and long story short and all kinds of emails and weird things going on, but like we were part of them that we weren't now we're part of Sumo and now we're locked in with Sumo Timber is now a little over 90 people and we are a hybrid studio.

We fully embrace remote. We're not going to order anyone back to the office because we think that's yesterday's thinking. We're firm believers that hybrid is the way to go. People right across Canada working for us. We have one full game in development with a publisher that we are making a game for them.

And we have another new IP that we're working on our own. And so that's the brief story of Timber. And

Lizzie Mintus: congrats on winning Best Places to Work two years in a

Joe Nickolls: row, right? Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah, best one of the best places in Canada to work. I think there we are now a midsize studio because, we're over 50 people.

So we won last year for the small studio. We won this year for the midsize studio. We share that that award with about, I think about five or six other studios across Canada. It was great because A couple of the companies that won are friends of mine, and we all went off to do our own startups.

And so I think that was super rewarding celebrating with them. But that was great. Yeah, it's it helps. It gets us attention. It gets people to go, wow, they're not just a lot of talk. If you do it one year, you could argue that. But the second time, if you do it again, then. Then you might have something worth noticing, and we're hoping that's the case.

Lizzie Mintus: think it might be. How do you think you were able to become the best place to work?

Joe Nickolls: There's a lot of things that we value, and there's a lot of things that we lean in on. We talked about diversity and inclusion. I don't know the exact number we are right now, but we're at least 50 50 male female at the company, which is pretty rare in video game land.

This is

Lizzie Mintus: amazing. This is one of the craziest I've ever heard.

Joe Nickolls: Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah. And and we didn't really set out at a specific number. Like about two months ago, we were 54 percent women and It was one of those things that we just wanted to make sure that we did a little bit more time looking further, looking harder, taking more time and hiring instead of just going to all the people you know.

And I think that's what happens a lot of the times people just hire their friends and they hire people they worked with because they're like, Oh, it's easy because I can just call this person. And the game industry is full of old white dudes like me. And we really tried to do something a little bit different.

So I think that's part of it. we Really stick to this number of values that we have, being diversity champions is one of them. Another thing that we really lean in is the most unsexy value sounding ever, but it's creators of clarity and What that really means is we want not only the people that play our products to know exactly how to play it, what to do, and what it means, but we want everyone that works at Timber to understand, here's where we're going, here's what we do, and this is why we're doing it, so we really lean into stuff like that, and I think the last bit of one of the reasons that has been very helpful for us is we maybe overshare we tell everyone in the team everything that's going on, even when it's painful Once a week we get in front of all of our team and say, okay, here's what's going on.

Here's what is working well. Here's what's scaring the crap out of us. This is the stuff we need your help with. This is the stuff we don't need to worry about. And I think when you do that, when you're upfront with people and share the journey with them very clearly, they appreciate that. And the amount of people that have come to us as a leadership team and said, I've never worked anywhere where people have been this.

Okay to share. And that's something that I've always wished in some of the places that I've worked. It's Oh, we know the star chamber and they're just going to do their star chamber things that we'll find out later. And we try not to do that. I think that's been very helpful for us.

Lizzie Mintus: It's fun to have a company because you can do all of the things you wished you had as an employee.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah. And it helps you value as well, some of the places that you've worked in the past. that you realize some of the hard decisions that companies that you have worked for have had to make and it gives you a perspective and it's very relevant so as a now as a founder of a company I look at all the things what used to piss me off when I used to work at different places and I try not to have that happen to our team it's it's cool it's a cool way to be and people seem to love it they tell us all the time that they really appreciate that we share all this stuff even when we're scared

Lizzie Mintus: And transparent and being vulnerable is huge

Joe Nickolls: in life, too.

Yeah, you know what the vulnerable, the word vulnerable is really funny, right? Because, I'm your typical guy and it's Oh, you're being very vulnerable right now. It's yeah. And then, years ago, I used to think being vulnerable was like, okay, just take a shot, do your best.

I'm going to let you punch me in the throat. And that's not what it is at all. And it takes, authors like Brené Brown and all these other, very engaging speakers and writers to shed light on the stuff that. The V word does not mean you're just going to, wimp out and just Oh God, do whatever you want.

It's not that at all. It's just being open to things. And I think that's, I think that's the what's been very helpful. Yeah,

Lizzie Mintus: hiring people is hard. And I say this. As a recruiter, I know you had a viral article on how companies can set up the interview process. Could you go into a little bit about how you think about finding the right people for your company and screening

Joe Nickolls: them?

It's, we tell people that, as as as approachable and fun as we like to think we are, it's really hard to get a gig at Timber. We put you through the ringer. You get interviewed by six to eight people for almost every single thing, because we think it's very important that we don't want to bring in anybody to the company that kind of disrupts who we are, the values that we have now, disruption is okay because it's not always negative.

We look, we coined a lot of terms. We don't look for people that are like fit our culture. We look for people that add to our culture because there's a big difference. If you just look for people that fit, you end up with, like everyone looking the same doing the same thing. So we try to lean into that.

And even when it's a bit weird, thinking, Oh my God, this person is like really out there. Do we want to bring this person in? And we really have a lot of talk about it. And then we ultimately decide yes or no, if this person is going to impact us for the better. We interview for so many things.

We interview for, culture ad. We feel we ask everybody. Tell me what it means to be tell me how you have fostered an inclusive environment. If you were a manager per se and we asked them, what does that mean to you? And it's really funny, you could say, you get such a wide range of answers, right?

You get, it's I think people should be vegans. Okay, great. That's not what we were going for. But anyway but then we get people that really lean into what that means. And we then meet as a group. We go through all the feedback and we talk about it together and then the exec team gets together and there's five of us and now and the exec level, we look at every hire and we go, okay.

Is this going to make Timber better? Is it going to help us move forward? Is the juice worth the squeeze? With this particular person? And sometimes we take risks. Sometimes we go, Oh God, I don't know. I don't know if this person can get there. And often times they can. I'll give you an example of somebody that we hired that we really thought this person was really cool, but we just weren't sure.

We have a person that works for us that's very good at using the Unreal Engine. And that's our engine of choice, that's what we've decided to do. The person that we interviewed, and ultimately we hired, had been using Unreal for, I don't know, seven, eight years, and has never made a video game, because they worked in the movie industry and they did pre visualization using the Unreal Engine to do pre visualization.

Now that's not making a game, but boy has this person been able to teach us a lot about things that we had never thought about that approach. And we try to find people That can add to that and that person in particular was able to have us go, we're showing something. He's Wow, why don't you do it this way?

Oh, yeah, that's why I never thought of that because of course we haven't we're not in Hollywood. So yeah, so we look for both diversity in who people are, their background, everything. We also look at their experience. And sometimes somebody might be a little bit just out of the industry that might work out.

And so we try to make sure that we evaluate those people all equally so that we can make an excellent decision going forward. I like that you hire

Lizzie Mintus: based on your values and you're really clear about that. And it's always a balance of values versus skills and potential.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah. I think anybody can learn a skill.

Anybody can learn. How to be better at Unreal or, a better engineer, better artist, you have it, but It's, values are something that you generally have an aptitude for. So we try to pay a lot of attention to people's, do they, do we feel like they're on the same page as us? The funny thing about Timber is, people know us before they know us, which is, they know who we are.

It's largely because we've led with our values and we were very active in social media talking about what we are and what we do that when people interview when we interview them, they know all about they do their research on us and they start asking us about things that we have put out there.

And so there we find people come to timber because they're attracted to the values. They're attracted what they think it works like what it's like to work with us. Now what that's what we've been told time and time again, they said, I feel like I already know you the first minute that they meet us. And it's almost like when you're watching, if you watch a, if let's say you've been watching the same newscast for years and years, six o'clock you watch the news, you feel like, the anchor people on the news, they have no idea who you are, but you feel like you know them because they're in your living room.

And we feel it's a little bit the same. They also feel like they know us because they we draw these ridiculous comics about what we do. And that's pretty funny. And so people go, wow, you look just like that dude that you're minus the jorts. But so you don't wear jorts just to clarify that.

No, the funny thing about that is so Jeff coats, he's our studio creative director, and he's the artist. He's an incredible artist. Jeff has been drawing me for about a decade. When we started working together at Capcom, it just happened one day, I was sitting there and Jeff was looking at me, looking down, looking at me, looking down what are you doing?

He's nothing. And then I go over to see what he's doing. He's drawing a picture of me with my beard down to my feet total Gandolfin. He's been drawing pictures of me. He's amazing. He can look at you for about five minutes and then draw you incredibly realistically cartoon wise very quickly.

But what that's done is it's made us a little, maybe a little more approachable. People see the cartoon versions of us. And it's helpful because then we don't have to act out or do anything because Jeff can just draw us in situations, mostly that I would never do, but Jeff would draw us in situations talking about our office and talking about our work and the way that we work.

And so people feel like that connection to us. And it's been pretty funny. The jorts thing. The George thing happened a long time ago. We rented a, we're in Vancouver. We rented this huge SUV. Then we had to go to Microsoft for a meeting. A bunch of us piled in there. We drove down there.

The parking lot was closed because of some maintenance. We had to park somewhere like off where we're supposed to park. And we came out after the meetings and every seagull in Seattle decided to deposit on our truck. It was unbelievable. It looks like they pulled this truck out of a lake by the time we got back to it.

And I went, Oh my God, we were laughing. We got to the border. Even the border guards going, What happened And then Jeff decided he was going to draw us all washing the truck before we took it back to the car rental thing and he did it. Oh, yeah, we're all wearing jorts. Yeah, doing that. And so that's where that started and stuck because it was funny.

But but yeah, I think because we have this medium that Jeff has. curated for us. We could talk about our message and sometimes they're just stupid, but sometimes we are able to really get the point across the things that are important and we do it in a visual way. I like the comics. I

Lizzie Mintus: remember when your studio started because I saw this comic on my LinkedIn feed.

I thought this is funny. This is unique. What is this about? I'm very interested. And then I started following along and I started following you. And then I started to see your Joe 100. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it started?

Joe Nickolls: Yeah. So when I left Maxis to come back to Vancouver, it was right in the middle of COVID and every time I would turn over the LinkedIn or something, it was just always the same stuff.

It was always somebody just. Talking about how great they were, what they did or some outsourcing people, it was just like the same crap or they were complaining about stuff. And I was thinking, I got lots of people that I'm linked in with. And I thought, I don't, I can't really talk about what I'm doing with the studio just yet.

Cause it was just in the planning phase. We hadn't announced it yet. So I thought, I think I'm going to do something. I think I'm going to start recognizing people that have had a positive impact on my career. And I thought, I think maybe I'm able to do about 20 people. And I start going through the list.

I was like, Oh my God, I could probably do 50 people. And I kept going through the list, going through the list. And I thought, Holy, I could do 200 people. And I thought that's crazy. So I thought I'm going to do 100. And so I thought I figured I would be writing up. My, my impact 100, 100 people that have impacted me really positively or even not necessarily positively, but just somebody I've really learned from over the years.

And so I started publishing this thing on LinkedIn and I started getting lots of people commenting and lots of people engaging with it. And they said, why are you doing this? Are you looking for a job? I'm like, no, I just said, I think it's pretty cool if we can just take a minute and be thankful for the people that helped us along the way.

Because every single one of us that works in this industry didn't get here just by ourself. We all had help. And I think it's important to recognize those people that have helped us along the way. So I started doing that. And people started calling me and saying, Hey, would you be cool if I did it? I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna, I don't own the rights to this.

You can do whatever you want. And other people started doing just thanking people publicly for the help that they received. And I actually had a so I've done 68 out of the 100 right now, and I've got, a few more to go, obviously, and I had a colleague reach out and said, We love this idea so much.

Can we sponsor your next one? I'm like, Sponsor it. He said, yeah, we want to sponsor your next Joe's Impact 100. I said that doesn't make you the person, right? They said no. We just think it's a great idea. We'll make a donation to the charity of your choice to sponsor it. No one.

Sure. So that's good. That's the next one that comes out will be a sponsored one. And it's just it's not going to have anything to do with the sponsor. It's going to say, Hey, this is brought to you by my friends that did this, and they've made a donation to this and they just want to get people to start seeing it.

It's been really rewarding, Lizzie. People have reached out, and you'd be amazed at how many people that have impacted. My career that just didn't know that and because it's hard for a lot of people to say, Hey, you've impacted my career and they get embarrassed to talk about it, right?

So this way they can't stop it. Almost every single one of these people have reached out and said, Oh, my God, this is incredible. This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. No one's ever said anything like this to me. And, they say it to me privately. But I know that it's important to give back because that's going to inspire them.

And, one person in particular that I used to work with at Microsoft a long time ago. She reached out to me and she said, I've been following along this thing you're doing. I said, yeah, cool. And she said, I just wanted to tell you something. I said, okay. And she said, I wanted you to know that you did something for me that I haven't told anyone.

Cool. What? And she said, do you remember when you and I were in Starbucks? And I'm like let me think of the billion times that was, you and I were in Starbucks and she goes, you might not even remember this. And I said, okay, she goes I had to give a very important presentation and I was terrified and I didn't know what to do.

And she said, and you and I were sitting at the Starbucks and you walked me through how to do it. And you asked me who the people I was going to be presenting to. And I knew a bit about the people she was presenting to you. I said, okay, this guy's a jerk. This guy's great. This person's going to be like this.

And so I gave her the map and I said, but just do this and we walked through some skills and some points that you might want to take. And, she went and she, apparently she slayed the meeting and I didn't really know that. And she said, you have no idea what you did for my confidence.

on that one day and she's gone off and formed another company and has nothing to do with me. She said these little small moments where people feel supported and she was an abs, she was absolutely a marginalized person. And she said it was just one of these little things that I really needed at that point that gave me a little bit of confidence.

I had that win and turn that win into another win. And I think people have to remember that these little things that you do that could be quite insignificant to you are huge for people. And I think it's really important to do that. So that's that whole story about the 100. It's been almost therapeutic for me.

And it reminds me of some things that have happened in my career that I, as I start really thinking, it's oh my god. And then I start remembering other stuff that I forgot. And it's been awesome. It's been really fun. I feel like you have

Lizzie Mintus: launched. You're not drawing yourself into that somebody else, but both are really unique things that you just decided to do and launch.

And then people really follow along and are interested. But I think people have a hard time, like you said, with getting started with public recognition, with posting, but doing anything that maybe makes them vulnerable, not to use the V word again, but how would you recommend that people even begin beginning is always the hardest part.

Other than to just do it.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah, it's easy to just go do it, but some some people have asked me similar questions could I do something like this? Would you be okay with it? I said, of course I'd be okay with it. What I usually tell people is if you want to do something like this, or if you're thinking about doing something like this, just have a think on why.

Why do you want to do it? And what is the medium that you want to use? And what do you want people to take away from it? For me, It was, I wanted to thank people for all the help that they've given me and what they've learned and then I always try and give them a fun fact that people just have no idea about that only I would know and sometimes it's hilarious.

I want to share stuff that I know about this person that I think that the LinkedIn community or whoever would find really interesting and funny. And so what I say to people is always think about what, why would you want to do this? And if it's for you to, to take a moment to be grateful to really be thankful for this kind of stuff that the support that you've given, I really believe that putting it out there, if you put it out there, it comes back to you.

And so I say to people, look, if you're really trying to do it because you're trying to get people to have, you're trying to get attention for your cool new business or website, and you think by doing something like this, it's just going to get more eyes on you. Okay, fine, present it as such the whole thing with Joe's Impact 100 had really nothing to do with timber, had everything to do with just me going, wow, I've had a pretty easy ride.

And it was, it's been pretty easy because of all these people. So I encourage people to to put stuff out there in a positive way. And you're going to get people that are going to think you're terrible and there's going to be people that think that, oh my God, this person's X and Y. Just ignore that crap.

Yes.

Lizzie Mintus: Someone wrote me a hate mail last week. This person sure having a bad day and then I deleted it. Yeah, that's okay. Somebody is going to not like whatever you do. I have a friend and their brain works in a very different way than mine. And they told me I had someone get really mad at me the other day.

And then I was thinking, I think somebody hates everybody. So I googled, do people hate Mr. Rogers? And there's a whole crowd of people that hate Mr. Rogers. And then I felt okay.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah. It's, what you pay, what you pay attention to can, can really impact your life and it's easy to say, just ignore stuff.

And I think there's, and I think really encouraging people to be self aware, to really have a long think about who they are and what they stand for and and what's important and valuable to them. People talk about video games and stuff. And I've been, I've been really lucky.

I've been doing this for 25 years. I'm actually not particularly good at making games. I'm really not. Where my skill tends to lean is I'm pretty good at building teams and building great teams that could do that work. I'm not a designer. I was a pretty, I was started as a producer.

I didn't even know any, I didn't do anything to do with video games when I started. I fluked into the job and I cannot believe they hired me. But they did. And I thought, okay, I'm here now. I still have no idea what I'm doing and had to figure it out. And but I think that's those days are not around anymore where you just don't walk into a, bang on someone's door.

I'm hungry for knowledge. Give me a job. It doesn't work that way anymore. At least not in video games. But but I think that I'm very thankful about people that did take chances. And I and it's the people that if people don't want to help you. Then just walk away, just ignore them.

Just go find someone that will. So that kind of goes back to your, who hates Mr. Rogers. And who cares? Don't busy yourself with people like that. I've reached out to people in my career in the early days. And most of the people got back to me. Some of them didn't. And that's okay.

I didn't hate him. I just moved on and found people that were willing to engage. And I find that people reach out to me all the time asking me questions. I can't say to people, yeah, I'll get you a job if they want some time and they want to, they want to ask me a few things. I always try to make myself available because people made themselves available for me.

And I think it's important to pay that back.

Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. You touched on your early days and a little bird named David Yee told me you were a radio host. Something like JoJo in the morning. Can you please elaborate on your beginning and how you

Joe Nickolls: fluked into games? Yeah. Yeah, I was a radio DJ for a while and hair down halfway down my back, everything pierced all that.

And yeah, I was a radio guy. Okay. And? Fun fact, radio people make Crap money. And I was doing that for a while. And as ego inflating, as working at a top 40 radio station could be a long time ago back when people used to listen to radio. That was awesome, but I was really music was my love.

I love music so much. And I was the music director for the radio station that I happened to work at. And then I always wanted to take the leap from from programming all the music and being on the air to being part of a record company. And so I pivoted to a record company and I was like, Promotions, marketing, that kind of stuff for what is now universal?

Music, but it it was polygram at the time. And so I had a number of labels that I was responsible for. And I did marketing and PR for everybody from, oh my god, from Def Twain to Bon Jovi to Elton John, Pavarotti, and everything in between. But I had all these really cool, dark, goth bands too, so they were really fun to hang out with.

And I did that for a while and literally one day I went to a pub and I was sitting with some friends and their friends brought some friends and the friend that they brought didn't have anything to do that day, it was someone's next door neighbor and his name was Kevin Wilkinson and he worked at Radical Entertainment.

And we hit it off. So what do you do? And I said, I work, I'm a record company guy. And he thought that was the coolest job in the world. And I'm like, Oh my God. Yeah. Talk to me about it when you're stuck with a hotel bill three in the morning. But it was fun. And I said, what do you do? He goes I make video games.

I'm like, Oh my God, that's so cool. And I played video games and I thought, wow, that's cool. I said, let's find out more about that. And he goes, do you want to come and see the office one day? I'm like, yeah. And so I got there. They said we're looking for a marketing guy. I'm like, I'm a marketing guy.

And so it's me. I'm here. I'm here. And so they said, okay. So they were interviewing me for a marketing job. Halfway through the interview Rory Arms who's been in the industry forever. He was running Radical at the time, along with Ian Wilkinson. They, halfway through the interview, he said, you should be a producer.

I'm like, okay. What do they do? They hired me, which is ridiculous. But they saw something in what I was able to do. And I remember starting and it was terrifying. I didn't know anything about making games. They do all about playing games. They don't think about making games. And I, they said, we want you to job shadow this person.

And then after a while, maybe you can take over. And I'm like, okay. And then two weeks after I started, this person laughed and they said, okay, you're in charge of this game now. And I'm like, you're talking about, I have no idea what I'm doing, but the team was great. They tested me. They made sure they put me through the ringer to prove that I could get through it.

And I did. And I'm very thankful for that original Radical team that I worked with because they taught me all about making video games. First video game I made was a game called NHL Power Play. Sorry, no, it was NHL Championship 2000. And it was a game with Fox Interactive when they had the little glowing ball on the glowing light on the puck so people could see it.

First game was a hockey game. And then I just went from there. But but yeah from radio DJ to music guy to video game person. And I think video game is the actual career though, because I've been doing that for a long time now. I think that's it. It is.

Lizzie Mintus: I found my job in recruiting by going to a bar and meeting a friend of a friend as

Joe Nickolls: well.

Nice. I Say to people all the time, 90 percent of your success and connections are based on people you meet and people that you know, because people open doors all the time and, have those ears open when you meet new people, find out what they do, listen to what they say, because in every single situation, it has worked out for me.

I, I was happy when I was a Capcom and I was working at Capcom, happy as a clam and then EA called me and I went, Oh my God, because I used to, I did 10 years at EA. Yeah, I saw you boomeranged. Yeah, I did 10 years at EA in sports and that's where I knew David Yi and I worked on FIFA for a long time, the World Cup and I got completely immersed in soccer, then hockey and tennis and all this other stuff and I left and, went to Microsoft and then did my own thing and then went to Capcom.

buT then EA called in and, asked me if I was interested in coming back, but moving to California and taking over Maxis and the Sims and Andrew Wilson is my friend. I went through the ranks, although Andrew went way further and faster than all of us, but we all worked together at EA.

And when I was being interviewed down in California Andrew Wilson walked in and he walks over and he goes, Joe Nicks. And he gives me a big hug. It's no time had passed. And I think because of relationships and. People, I think that opens a lot of doors and so always, look at all the conversations that you have with people that you know, or don't know and really take a moment and really try to listen.

I'm an okay listener. I Strive to be a better listener. I don't, I don't know anyone that's a great listener, but I try to be a better listener and I try to hear what people are really saying. And this conversation is 90 percent me because you were interviewing me and asking me questions.

So I'm answering, but on the flip side, it's like, it's just as important to ask questions of the other person and listen to what they have to say unless you're on my podcast, unless you're on your podcast. Yeah, yes, unless I'm gonna talk, we're gonna talk about Lizzie and all the things I dug up on her that you don't know I'm interested,

Lizzie Mintus: I found my job at a bar.

Joe Nickolls: She was working at a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true. I wasn't

Lizzie Mintus: working. I worked at Nordstrom in sales, but I learned you're in Nordstrom. I worked at Nordstrom, but the things that I learned from talking to people and trying to, it's just the same as recruiting, really somebody, except for you're in real life and you have to approach people in real life and you can't say.

Hey, would you like a tie? Cause they'll just say no. Do you have to have a conversation and it's just like recruiting. You can't say, Hey, would you like a job? It's just a knee jerk thing. No, I don't want

Joe Nickolls: that. I've worked with amazing recruiters and I've worked with terrible recruiters.

Yes, that's true. But but the same could be said of any job. Recruiting is hard. Recruiting is a skill. It is something that I think is often undervalued because you need them, and then you don't need them. And then you need them, and then you don't need them. It's we go through these things.

We have a great recruiting team at Timber. And it is an absolute skill. And we have specific recruiters for specific needs. Because we have, for example, we have a recruiter that does all of our tech people, it does our engineering people because she knows about that community.

And so she focuses on that community. So all recruiters are not recruited. They're just not recruited equal, right? That's really important. For someone like yourself, it's important for the people listening to this podcast, if they've made it this far to, to understand that People that choose to be recruiters as a profession, they are the most beaten up team you will ever find because they've get, they do a lot of work they have moments of success and it's right back to the grind.

And it's a hard slog. And I think people should probably take a moment for recruiters to understand what they do. Thank you

Lizzie Mintus: for that. It is. There's lots of ups and downs, but it's always interesting. People keep it interesting. People do all sorts of things, but it's fun. And. I think it's really fun when you focus on an industry for a really long time.

There's people I've hired multiple times. There's people I hired a long time ago and now they have studios and now they're the boss and now I hire for them. So just like you said in games, You worked with Andrew for so long how would you know where you'd end up eventually? So I think in recruiting, it's really important to treat people well.

And I always tell my team, think about what you can do to make this a special experience for someone. What can you do to go out of your way to make sure that they're really having a good time and you can help them and you could be a partner to them because they will remember you and you will encounter them.

Most definitely again, somehow 100 percent

Joe Nickolls: video game recruiting. Yeah, there, I worked with I worked with a woman in recruiting. She's legendary. Her name is Christine Cheeky and I just call her Cheeky. And when she was the one that recruited me to come back to EA. And to this day, she's such an exceptional woman.

Every time I'm in the Bay Area or at every conference, I always make time to find Christine Cheeky and spend time with her. Because she's, she's like the exec recruiter for the specific exec roles at EA. But, one of the reasons I love her is that she goes above and beyond.

She, I'll give you an example. My daughter had gone to university and she was going for this role. And she went to school in London and it was called the central St. Martin's and it was all about fashion and design and whatnot. And she wanted to do that career. And anyway, she was, she was thinking about her career and how to move forward and.

I was trying to advise her, but I'm like your typical dad, like it's like dad's going to tell me what to do. He's so dumb. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Oh my God. You're like it. So I said to Christina, Christina said, I don't think she goes, I'll talk to her. Will you? And she, she's the exact recruiter for EH time to talk to my daughter and give her some tips and some stuff.

And my daughter will always remember that. I will never forget that she did that for me. She didn't have to do it, but she did. And it's those things that you do that are extra. Find me a job. Yes. Okay. I'm going to try and find you a job, but I'm going to get to know you. And if I can't find you a job now, I'm going to remember you.

And then one day I'm going to be in a conversation with someone. They're going to go, Oh my God, if I could only find this person to go. Oh, Yes. You got this person nice to deal with. I'm gonna

Lizzie Mintus: call him right now. That's exactly. That's exactly what recruiting is. That's exactly what it is. But you have, I have so many weird facts in my brain.

My friend in person, unrelated to games completely, we were hanging out and she's Oh, my, my friend her husband works at Valve. And I was like, what? Oh yeah, Valve, did he go on the Hawaii vacation this year? And she's like, how do you know that? I'm like, oh, I have all kinds of information. The studio does this, the pay is this, and here's their interview structure.

And Canada's here's this person's kid's name and their kid likes fashion. It's funny. So you have to have that brain because you have so much information.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah. You're trusting the recruiter with a lot of things. You're trusting them with your personal data, who they are, what they stand for, what they want to do.

So there has to be a lot of trust between the employee and the recruiter because you will probably tend to use that person again, right? Yeah. If that, Oh my God, I got this great job and stuff. And I'm thinking about something else and I call Lizzie and say, Lizzie, remember when you helped me with that thing?

I'm thinking of something else. And when I was at, when I was at EA and I was thinking, okay, I want to move back to Vancouver. And I was thinking about that. I was thinking maybe I should do something else. I've been thinking about doing something else. So I called a colleague of mine.

You know what, I'm sitting here at my desk and I'm thinking about what I'm doing and I think there's a couple, there's a, there's an itch I need to scratch and I'm not quite sure, but I think I want to do something like this and he goes, I got just a guy and like within two weeks I was at GDC having lunch with this other guy that actually was one of the main reasons that Timber even got started in the first place.

And it took a year after I met that person for it to become reality, but it happened. And and so those connections you make will come back tomorrow and help you, I firmly believe that. Yeah,

Lizzie Mintus: me too. I have one last question and before I ask it, I want to point people to your website so they can work for you.

Timbergames. com and

Joe Nickolls: T I M B R E Yes, not E R.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, domains and trademarks are really fun. What is something that is amusing, entertaining and surprising that people would not

Joe Nickolls: know about you? About me? Yeah. Oh my god, what's interesting that people might not know about? Besides the radio DJ thing, that's awesome.

Yeah, besides the radio DJ thing, that's the thing that most people glom onto. That I don't get my energy, I don't get my energy for making games, I get my energy for making teams and I make games today and I love making games. I sometimes feel like I could, I sometimes feel like I could work for Lululemon or I could work for Proctor and Gamble and have the same results because I think that's the thing that I get the most joy out of is find, I love to find, I love to find people and see, peer into the talent of what they do.

And try to be almost like a career matchmaker, not a recruiter, but like a person that can say, yeah, a little bit, right? But but, I really, I really get I get a lot of joy on that. I am as tall as people think. Jeff draws me about 11 feet tall, not 11 feet tall, but I am 6'5 and and Jeff is actually not as small as he is.

Jeff is about 6 feet tall, but in our Christmas card last year, he was in a baby Bjorn on my shirt. Tiny person. But, amazing. Yeah. Because I'm pretty social you may not have figured out I'm an extrovert. It's. It's. I wear my heart on my forehead. There's usually, I call it as I see it.

Most people know where they stand. I think out loud a lot and I talk about a lot of stuff. But yeah, I, I really do. I love finding groups of people and trying to find a way to make that chemistry work on a team and they get out of the way and just let them do their thing and try to be there to course correct when I can.

But I think, yeah, that's it. Like the thing I just love building teams. And I think you do that with good communication, openness, honesty and a sense of humor. If you don't have a sense of humor, you're only going to get half as far as you think you're going to. I think that's really key.

Yeah, it is.

Lizzie Mintus: We've been talking to Joe Nichols, VP of Sumo Digital and co founder and managing director of Timbre, T I M B R E Games. Joe, you have so many resources out there, the Joe 100 comics where can people go to work for you, learn about you, resources on old white guy talks about diversity.

Joe Nickolls: Yeah actual thing I did called prosumo old white guy talks about women in leadership and diversity, and they actually let me use that title. But it was awesome. It was pretty fun. But yeah, there's lots of ways to get in touch with me on this. LinkedIn is probably the easiest and timber as well.

And by the way, the reason it's spelled that way is because it's it's a play on words. It's like the Tombra, the tone of voices coming together. And we thought, Oh, it's going to be like Combra, but we're going to pronounce it timber and make it feel like voices coming together. That's why we have the logo we have, and that's why we spelled the company that way.

Oh, thank you for telling the

Lizzie Mintus: story. I like it. Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe Nickolls: Awesome. Thank you, Lizzie.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch 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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