Paid, always, whether or not they get the job
Four hours at a real rate. If a studio cannot afford that, it cannot afford to hire.
Pro edition
Hiring Kit.
The demo publishes the bands and the crunch record. This is the machinery behind them. Written for a studio of five to twenty — everything here gets harder at three hundred and most of it stops being true at three thousand.
The job post
| Put this in | Instead of | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The band, in the first screen | "Competitive salary", "DOE", "negotiable" | The single highest-impact change available. It filters out the mismatches before either side spends an hour, and it is the reason good candidates who are not desperate reply at all. |
| The location arrangement, precisely | "Flexible", "hybrid-friendly" | "Three days in the office, Tuesday to Thursday" is a fact. "Hybrid" is a word that has meant five different things at five different studios this year. |
| The interview steps, numbered, with the time each takes | Nothing, then six rounds | A candidate budgeting their evenings needs to know whether this is four hours or twenty. Publishing it also stops the loop quietly growing. |
| What the first six months actually contain | "Exciting challenges", "fast-paced environment" | Name the project, the discipline and who they sit with. Somebody good is choosing between offers on this, not on the adjectives. |
| One honest constraint | Only upsides | A studio that names a real drawback is a studio a reader starts believing about everything else. It also pre-empts the discovery that would have cost you them in month four. |
3 steps, 8.8 hours, 4 of them paid
- 45 min
Hiring lead 1. Call Two-way. Half of it is them asking. The band, the arrangement and the loop are already published, so none of that call is spent on logistics. - 240 min
Alone, at home 2. Paid task Four hours, paid at the mid contract rate, on a problem adjacent to real work but never on the actual backlog. Delivered with a deadline of a week so it fits around a job. - 240 min
Three of the team 3. Half day Walk through the task, one technical conversation, one non-technical, and lunch. The lunch is not a test and nobody scores it.
Three steps, about nine and a half hours of a candidate’s life, four of them paid. A six-round loop does not select better; it selects for people with time, which is a different thing and usually a worse one.
5 rules for a paid task
Never on the actual backlog
The moment a test task ships in the product, the studio has bought work for the price of a hiring process and everybody can see it.
Four hours means four hours
Scope it, test it on somebody internal, and tell candidates to stop at the limit. The ones who spend twelve are not showing you more skill, they are showing you more availability.
Same task, same rubric, written before the first candidate
Otherwise the rubric is written after the fact around whoever the panel liked, which is how a process launders a preference into a decision.
Feedback within a week, whatever the answer
Somebody gave you four hours. The cost of a paragraph is nothing and the reputational return is out of all proportion.
Rejections
| Do | Not this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Say which step, and one specific reason | "We decided to move forward with other candidates" | One sentence of specificity is the difference between a rejection somebody resents and one they recommend you over. It costs about ninety seconds. |
| Say whether to apply again, honestly | "We’ll keep your CV on file" | If the answer is no, saying so is kinder than a file nobody opens. If it is yes, say what would need to be different. |
| Send it yourself, from a person | An unattributed no-reply address | A named sender means a candidate can reply and ask. Most do not; the ones who do are worth the exchange. |
| Within a week of the decision | Silence | Ghosting after a paid task is the single most damaging thing a small studio can do to its hiring reputation, and it is entirely free to avoid. |
The first week
- Day 1 Machine works, accounts exist, somebody eats lunch with them. No work.
- Day 2 A real, small, shippable task with a named buddy. Merged by Friday.
- Day 3 Sit in on a playtest. Watching a stranger play the game teaches more than any document.
- Day 4 One-to-one with the lead: what the first three months look like, and the band conversation, in writing.
- Day 5 Ask them what was confusing, write it down, and fix the top item before the next hire.
6 ways a hire goes wrong before it starts
- "Competitive salary" in the post, then a band conversation in round three that ends it.
- A six-round loop that selects for availability rather than skill.
- An unpaid test task, and every good candidate with options quietly declining.
- A rubric written after the interviews, around whoever the panel already liked.
- Silence after a paid task, and a reputation that takes two years to repair.
- A first week with no machine, no task and no lunch, and a new hire who is already recalculating.
Pay-transparency law now requires a published band in a growing number of jurisdictions and the list changes yearly; check your own before treating any of this as compliance advice. The argument here is that publishing is worth doing where it is not yet required.