Matthew Jeffery_2

DeeDee Doke spoke with EA’s global director of talent brand

Making video game company Electronic Arts the place to work is a serious business for Matthew Jeffery, EA’s global director of talent brand and the winner of Recruiter’s 2010 Recruitment Personality of the Year Award.

From programmers to artists, and from sound effects technicians to project managers, EA is looking for people who, in Jeffery’s words, “have the skillsets, they can grow, they can be challenged… and [have] the added things we need, [such as] passion, wanting to make a difference, wanting to lead in their speciality, team players”.

Yes, you might say, but lots of employers are looking for candidates who fit that same bill. On the other hand, a wander through EA’s Guildford offices - complete with a balcony lounge where employees can play Rock Band on their breaks, open plan work rooms decorated with Harry Potter collectables and a company store where employees enjoy healthy discounts on EA products - suggests that the EA brand should have no difficulty attracting worthy candidates.

But wait. Not only is this a company that faces the brand challenge of competing with the world’s top brands for the talent it needs to produce its market-leading games; this is a company that has not always been as likely a contender to successfully woo, win and ultimately keep such talent.

EA learned a bitter lesson about the power of the internet and the harm it can wreak on an employer’s reputation. In 2004, the unhappy partner of an EA employee in the US posted a lengthy blog about the six- and seven-day work weeks her fiance was enduring in the run-up to the launch of new products, with unpaid overtime. The now infamous EA Spouse blog received scathing coverage across major US news outlets, and EA found itself paying out millions of dollars in class action lawsuits related to the unpaid overtime allegations.

The damage to EA’s reputation as an employer was major. “This ballooned across the internet,” Jeffery acknowledges. “We had a heavy lesson in the power of the internet because it really affected and damaged our brand, and our ability to attract candidates. But it was also good for the brand ultimately because it’s changed the company and matured us in the way we project manage. I’m not saying we don’t have issues, but it certainly opened our eyes.”

Jeffery had been working at EA for about 18 months as European head of studio recruitment when the EA Spouse blog exploded in the company’s face. While working at TMP Worldwide in mid-level executive search, Electronic Arts was one of his clients. When EA invited him to join the staff in 2003, he took up the offer “that was too good to refuse” to move in-house.

“I came in when the games industry was really starting to take off,” he recalls. “The industry was very immature; it was based on bedroom programmers and people at home. I was brought on board to help build up the UK studio, which had won the licence to develop the Harry Potter games. Our challenge was to attract people from other industries who wouldn’t be familiar with what we were offering or what our brand was about.”

Fast forward to 2008. As European head of studio recruitment, Jeffery had succeeded in centralising recruitment, developing strategies to attract talented staff from competitors and streamlining recruiting procedures that could effectively and efficiently hire a team of 100 people to produce a game that would enter the market in a year to 14 months. EA had taken steps to better address its employee work-life balance and was moving on from the fallout of the EA Spouse controversy. But employer brand was becoming an issue for the organisation in a different way.

“Two years ago, I was seeing that the market was converging,” Jeffery says. “By that I mean other industries were taking talent from the video game sector, and we were taking people from retail, financial services and from the public sector. The talent pool of experienced programmers was really shrinking. Game industry competitors, the film industry, IT, the mobile industry were all fighting in this talent pool together. It was getting quite dirty.

“A person could trade off several offers against each other, and we were seeing a bit of salary inflation.”

Jeffery and his boss, vice president of global talent acquisition, Cindy Nicola, recognised that EA had to take a more definitive approach to creating and asserting its identity in the marketplace to compete with the likes of Nike and Coca Cola for talent. “What we needed was to build a global employment brand and start to attract these people out,” Jeffery says. “This led to a number of changes.”

One change was his ascent to the position of director of global talent brand. Once there, Jeffery’s agenda covered everything from the recruitment marketing and advertising messaging EA was transmitting to the kinds of events EA attended and organised to meet potential recruits. The job was created, he says, “to create new pipelines, new messaging, new marketing”.

Event management was one of the first areas to get Jeffery’s attention. Some events EA was involved with, such as trade shows and graduate recruitment fairs, attracted what Jeffery calls “junior talent” and duplicated more sophisticated outreach strategies of building partnerships with university professors, providing guest lecturers and helping with curriculum development to reach the highest echelon of youthful talent.

At the other end of the spectrum, EA’s events aimed at attracting more experienced candidates also got a revamp. Jeffery dropped their existing road shows in favour of events offering big-name speakers and requiring pre-registration so that EA recruiters could “learn about these people”, Jeffery says.

And then came the advent of social media. At EA, Jeffery has adopted a multi-pronged approach to incorporating social media into his branding strategy.

EA’s LinkedIn presence has two separate communities, one for alumni and the other for non-employee professionals. For the latter, the question was: “How do we engage them in discussion? We want those people on a repeat visit talking about things” that were not related to recruitment, Jeffery says.

If you’re creative and you’re passionate, and you’re a people person, that’s what recruitment’s all about for me

Once the engagement on LinkedIn started to take off, Jeffery moved on to creating a presence on Facebook. “The key thing there was mixing a number of things,” he says. Since Facebook is a people-focused medium, EA’s presence there had to unveil the human side of the company, “so you’ve got stories about people, the locations, the business, what the people do in their spare time, the fun they’re having, discussions on the latest games, then opportunities - which are not just about jobs, it’s about promotions, career development, skills, all these different things,” he says.

“A lot of the problems with social media and recruiters is they’ve taken the attitude, ’Let’s just post up jobs.’ It’s a one-way conversation of bang, bang, bang, ’here’s the latest job, click on Twitter or Facebook.

“For us,” he continues, “it’s about a dialogue, a discussion, taking people on a journey, and the widest possible number of people involved in that community will then sort of funnel down and become your candidate community.”

Within eight months of launching EA’s Facebook page, it had a community of over 100,000 ’friends’. “That was pretty phenomenal,” he concedes. “Within that, you’ll see discussions that are the simplest things, like hey, what are you doing this weekend? Or what’s the weather like where you are? And people all across the world would put what they were doing or what the weather was like.”

The employment brand side of EA also has a presence on Twitter and on You Tube.

Jeffery says that globally, EA’s employer brand does not always have the advantage of a well-known consumer brand to spread its name. “In some markets, like India, Singapore and China, whilst the product brand is fighting for space,” he says, “we’re fighting to show to the talent pool, ’Come and work with us, and be part of the product brand as it grows.’ That’s an interesting challenge.”

Once the brand has attracted potential recruits, Jeffery wants the attraction to continue. “What is the ultimate candidate experience?” he asks. “It’s when they walk out of here, and they think, ’Wow, I didn’t get a job there but my god, I’m going back and trying to get in there at whatever level.’ That’s a killer employment brand.”

And the challenge continues. What keeps Jeffery and his team awake now is ’The Next Big Thing’. “What is the next big idea? Where is it coming from? That’s what motivates all of our team, and everybody here is looking. We’re struggling to come up with what that big concept is that’s going to electrify recruiters - but that’s what we’re going to be trying to come up with, which is very cool.”

Oct 2007- present Global director of talent brand, EA
Jan 2003 - Sep 2007 Head of European studio recruitment, Electronic Arts
Feb 2002 - Jan 2003 Senior search & selection consultant, TMP Worldwide
June 2001 - Jan 2002 Recruitment director, Impetus Search
Feb 1999 - May 2001 Managing consultant (IT/telecoms), Pricejamieson (PJ)
Sep 1998 - Feb 1999 Senior rec consultant, The Lloyd Group
Aug 1997 - Sep 1998 UK sales & marketing manager, The Royal Pobjoy Mint
July 1996 - Aug 1997 UK product manager, MDM, The Crown Collections
1993 - 1996 Manager, NatWest Education: MSc (Econ) Politics & Government of Europe, LSE

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