The internship hiring process at Redhill Games has recently been put into overdrive. While the company has hired interns before, it had never established an all-encompassing program for them to be brought in and trained en-masse. Sandra and Olena from the Operations department built the program for both mentors and mentees – after all having the opportunity to train more junior employees helps the more senior staff to further develop their leadership skills as well as putting each department’s standard protocols to the test by introducing them to someone with no prior experience of navigating them. The mentors at the company joined Ben, our Talent Acquisition Manager, in reviewing 649 applications from which 6 interns were eventually selected across various departments within Redhill.
Our CEO, Matias commented on how the process went, stating:
The best teams have the right mix of experience and younger talent. It makes for a healthy team dynamic to have people from various stages of their career journey. The results speak for themselves. While it takes time and effort from both the studio and interns, both can benefit immensely from these internship programs.
Interviews with the Interns
The interns were interviewed on their experiences after several months of working at the company. They were asked about their backgrounds, reasons for wanting to work in the video game industry generally as well as Redhill specifically.
Inari Turja
On the topic of reasons for wanting to work in the gaming industry, Inari, a UX Design Intern said that she had wanted to get into video game development since childhood, with a playthrough of Dragon Age 2 in high school being a pivotal moment for deciding that this is what she wanted to do for a living. According to her, there was still a gap between that ‘that thought and an understanding there is an actual opportunity to work in games.’ This gap was filled by her studies in game design, which covered ‘all of its aspects’ – Inari initially considered narrative and writing within video games as a vocation but eventually decided she was more passionate about a UI and UX course and chose to pursue those specialties.
Having no concrete expectations due to this being her first internship, Inari described the experience as being ‘eye-opening’. Having done her thesis on UI/UX and having theoretical knowledge on the subject, implementing this knowledge into an efficient, working product was still different in practice but it ended up being a skill she picked up throughout her internship. More tellingly, when reflecting on the nature of the internship Inari relates that she used to think of herself as an ‘overthinker’, with the internship revealing that there were in fact numerous paths and points of view that she hadn’t taken into consideration that would only be revealed to her in the process of working with experienced industry professionals here at Redhill.
Inari’s is just one of several stories of people whose lifelong dream of working on current and exciting video game projects was realized because of a Redhill games internship. However, her story is only one type of scenario that is seen at Redhill – some of our interns never thought of a career in the video game industry at all until the prospect of work at Redhill presented itself to them. This is how Isabel, a Software Engineer Intern, ended up at the company.
Isabella Salmi
Even though Isabel grew up playing video games, she didn’t think that there were opportunities in gaming for her. She had studied software and game programming as well as UI/UX, but ultimately decided to focus on programming, spending as much as 12 hours per day for a year to get her career started. Despite that, opportunities for programming seemed few and far between, that is until she encountered a job listing for the internship at Redhill games and felt that it ‘matched [her] tech stack’.
According to her: “Many other entry-level positions already have high expectations for skillsets acquired through past experiences. Being a career changer, it was important for me to be given this opportunity”. Having gone through the internship process Isabel says that she feels appreciative of the company giving her the opportunity and resources to learn without expecting her to be an expert immediately. Her mentor eventually noticed that she could work independently, eventually giving her the freedom and responsibility to execute tasks independently. According to her, “Reviewing the work still happens, and the support is there when I need it, but it feels nice to be trusted”.
As far as things outside of her responsibilities at work are concerned, Isabel says that she enjoys the fact that the company culture is not too uptight, there is no formal dress code and people let their personality show in the workplace. In addition to that, “People chat with you even if they are not in your team, there’s always support available for everything you need help with”. Summing up her experiences at Redhill, Isabel concludes that the experience of the internship at Redhill ‘sets the bar pretty high for any future work’.
These two stories are just an example of the kinds of opportunities an internship can provide to enter the gaming industry. Despite one’s background or level of prior involvement in video game development with the proper skills and level of commitment, an internship at Redhill can give anyone an opportunity to be mentored by genuine professionals by executing complex and interesting tasks. If this sounds like something you’re interested in – check out what kinds of listings Redhill Games have open right now!
Want to become a Redhillian?
We are always on the lookout for more Redhillians – so head out to careers.redhillgames.com and see what openings are available!