Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I've got a world traveler, a man who I first interacted with in Malaysia a few years ago and who has since moved industries and has worked in entertainment, in games today, and a few other, and oiling gas before, and is today the Director of People and Legal for Big Viking Games. Welcome to the show, Bob. Mr. Bob St-Jacques, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Welcome to the show, Bob.

Bob: All right, well thank you, Max, happy to be here.

Max: Pleasure to have you. And of course, we interacted with Bob when he was leading the people function at a company called 7Geese which got acquired by Paycor which is a leader in OKR methodologies. So, for the HR performance enthusiasts that are listening, they'll be familiar with OKR methodology and it's a great foundation for start-ups. So, anyway, that's a little bit about your background but perhaps, Bob, I'd like to ask you to walk us back to the early days of how you ended up working in talent acquisition and dealing with people. Was it by design or by accident?

Bob: It was by design because I had a very good mentor and it was, going back a few years, 1992 and I was going to get a master’s in industrial relations with Cornell and my mentor suggested, he said, what do you want to do? I said, I wanna do HR. He said, no no no that's not gonna work.  He said what you need to do is pick a problem. Pick something that you wanna pour your heart and soul into and I said, well HR is basically broken, right? 91, 92, there was a recession going on in North America. I was working in Parliament at the time, so we were holding hearings, and nobody was happy. Employees, employers, communities would lay off. Nobody was happy. So, I said, hey look this is one of those problems that, like climate change, it's big and I can't fix all of it, but maybe I can fix something. So, he said, look if you wanna do that, go to law school and practice employment law then go into HR because you will spend the first five years learning from other people's mistakes. So that's exactly what I did. I went to law school, practiced employment law for five years and then got hired by my client. And basically, what I've done since 2000 is work on transformation efforts. So, in the beginning, they were turned around. So, I worked for a client who's called the Lens Crafters and they were in pretty rough shape, but if anybody wonders why I'm an optimist two and a half years later they're number 58 on the Fortune 100 best companies to work for list. Then I worked at Delta Airlines after 9/11, so I turned them around, right. So, this is why my optimism comes in. Moved to Dubai, things got a little bit more difficult because I had to help transform companies that were in scale-up and that were already growing about a hundred percent every year and how do you tell those folks, you're leaving money on the table you need to do more. So that was a further challenge and so I helped a lot of high growth organizations in Dubai, all over the Middle East, South Asia and Africa as well, worked in oil and gas in Nigeria for example. And then I went to the Far East and started focusing on tech, tech high-growth companies, tech scale-ups in that area and I've done the same thing here in Vancouver. So, the central theme is I've kept to my mission which is I want to help HR. And that's what I've done throughout my whole career. Sometimes, as you mentioned, being an OKR expert, spreading the love and the gospel of it, of OKRs, and sometimes there's goals more specific toward the company.

Max: I think it's good advice for the young people to walk towards the problem, not away from the problem. You see an industry that's broken and a company that has issues and, you know, don't run away from it. That's an opportunity to make an impact and to work on a whole career duration on fixing something. I can empathize with that on my end. I saw a lot of broken things that I'm still trying to fix on high volume recruitment. So, maybe a word about Big Viking Games, your current company, which I understand has gone through some transformation over the last few months since you've been there for six months now. And we're gonna talk about how the talent acquisition strategy has been transformed to expand the talent pool. But can you set the scene for us, what does this company do?

Bob: Yeah, so, Big Viking Games was started at, well I could tell you, it was 10 years ago in about a month. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary which is a pretty big deal. Only 4% of companies make it to 10 years so we had a fun event for everybody, and we managed to bring a bunch of people together. Now the challenge was six months ago is that the company had been making games but had been kinda flat-lined and just kinda been bumbling along for the past three four years. And so, they were looking to revive and expand. And the interesting piece is that in the gaming industry it's usually boom and bust all the time, right. Hire a bunch of people to make a new game, I'll make some money, oh you sold it off and then you drop the right number of employees and the revenue goes like this, it's big yoyo. So, what they decided was that's not sustainable and that's not great for employees. Employees in the gaming industry will tell you, yeah, I've been laid off and hired, right. You look at gaming LinkedIn profiles and they've all had 14 jobs in 10 years and it's not because they're job-hoppers, it's been most of the time because they've been laid off. So, the company decided to move towards a live operations model. What does that mean? It means they don't create their own games, they either expand things that they have, and they typically buy intellectual property and then expand it and run it. So that's a big switch from making games boom-and-bust to just kind of like very linear growth. And so, it's a challenge because you need different types of people, different types of mindset in that area.

Max: Basically, in the oil and gas, it's like moving from being a builder to an operator.

Bob: Correct. And so, there was the challenge. We need different types of individuals, different types of talents. and we needed to grow, and we were looking at acquisitions and so on. So fast forward, six months, what we have found ourselves is before we were in one vertical where we had a Facebook/Web games there which you know was alot so we had really high MPS scores. 70% of our players play our game 27 out of 28 days which is pretty impressive for games right. So, we got this loyal fan base. But now, we've attached, we've done an acquisition, we've expanded on a couple areas and so as folks will see throughout December, we will be putting out press releases in these areas. So, where we were in one verticals, we will not be in four verticals starting in January as we close these deals. So that's created some challenges and opportunity areas as well because we got new places we're expanding into and we're also expanding our current offerings. So, another piece of good news and we just got it less than 24 hours ago, again talk about the power transformation. When I joined, the Glassdoor score for the company was 2.2, when I said things are bumbling along, it was a bit in rough shape. Yesterday we were just notified by the Great Place To Work Institute that we are certified by them as a great place to work. So, when people talk about transformation is too hard, and I love the phrase that you used, running towards the problem. So, if you look at things as an opportunity in terms of aligning people behind the business s...