If Work is Work Then You Are in the Wrong Business

Everybody wants to know that they can be comfortable in the work environment. So showing that you can fit into the culture of a place is an important aspect, maybe the most important aspect, of the professional job search process.

I currently work in the video game industry as an animator for the Sony owned production company Santa Monica Studios. Most famously, I helped produce animation for the massively popular game God of War III. Overall, what my job entails is making the animations look smooth within the game. I worked on many of the background characters. I took the different poses that were designed by the character designers and filled in the frames of animation between poses to make them look realistic and fluid.

This video game industry is notoriously closed off. You may find a job here or there on a big job board (as I found mine), but you really do not have a chance unless you either know somebody or have worked for someone else in the industry (this is not me talking, this is more than one employer telling me this during the interview process). Because I had some networking skills to learn, I was looking for this job for around 2 years. I am sure that being black did not help, as I am not the type of person that usually does this type of job, stereotypically. So I had to attend a lot of networking events and call in a lot of favors from friends before I actually got the job, although I found it on HotJobs.

The thing that I found is most important out of anything in the job search process has been my ability to adapt. Many of the employers that I interviewed with share many of the same traits, and one of them, I found, was the ability to talk to them in their language (the language of the industry). I was expected to be one of them, a gamer with a real passion for video games. I am a gamer, but it was not to the level of these guys, at least not at the beginning. I made myself that way by playing games, going to arcades, and hanging out with gamers.

What led up to me learning this lesson was the glazed looks that I got from many employers when I would go over my previous experience and ask them my lame questions about how the company was run and what their favorite thing was about working here. They were, quite simply, bored with me. They probably were thinking that I would not fit in to the culture there, and the culture, I have found now that I am inside, is all about fun, fun, fun.

Three pieces of advice for the job search -

1. I have found that keeping it lighthearted works wonders, but being fake does not work.
2. Being perfect is impossible, so I found the best thing is to just own up to mistakes and show how you overcame them. If this can be done with a sense of humor, brownie points.
3. It really is all about finding work that you can be passionate about.

My stories -

1. No one responded to me until I made a conscious effort to keep my interviews lighthearted. I know that the video game industry might be different from other industries, but I do think that it can not be that much different. I worked in other industries temporarily, including retail, construction and sales, and everybody appreciates a fun personality to a degree. It is just that those industries have less choices for qualified employees, so they sometimes have to hire less than desirable people. But when I started going in truly happy, I would get callbacks.
2. I simply could not cover up the holes in my resume. I have a period of 1.5 years unemployment, and my first jobs were not exactly what you would expect of a college graduate. When I tried to cover up my mistakes, I would get glazed over eyes and short answers. When I began owning them with some humor, I found that many of my interviews went better because the interviewers could relate to me. I would trade stories, but I would definitely be sure to let them know how I had grown up and that I was now a responsible person. They seemed to take this much better, and this is when I started getting second interviews and callbacks.
3. I had a lot of jobs for which I had no passion, and it was obvious. I was trying to get other jobs while I was doing that, but they were also in industries that I did not like. I got no, and I mean no, attention from these employers even though I was highly qualified. For instance, I went for a managerial position at a retail store that was beside the one at which I was currently working. Everybody at the store knew me and they knew that I could sell. They did not give me the job, however, because they knew that I simply did not want to work there. It was actually this interview which made me focus on the video game industry. Heck, if I was going to fail at interviews, I was at least going to do so at a job that I wanted.

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