The Company Getting Thousands Of People Jobs In Esports: Hitmarker Needs YOU!
Looking for a job in esports? Maybe game development, social media management for orgs, or pretty much anything you can think of in the gaming sphere? Would you like to apply for amazing jobs such as Team Liquid’s Social Media Manager, or perhaps even the Overwatch League team Atlanta Reign’s personal chef (specialising in Korean cuisine)? That was their most-viewed job ever by the way.
Whether it’s team management, editorial, social, creative, development – the list is endless - Hitmarker is for you. Bored of trawling through Linkedin, Monster, Indeed, and specific company sites? Not only do Hitmarker boast accolades such as Service Provider Of The Year at the 2020 UK Esports Awards (AND 2019); they currently have 12,000 live jobs on their platform.
Hitmarker is a gaming and esports job platform founded in 2017, and are aiming to expand – by a lot. From stripping back their social media presence into a grassroots organic place to receive support and advice, to providing Brazil, Spain, Japan, and China with their own Hitmarker sites, the goals are ambitious.
As esports grows in popularity, so does the need for esports hires, and Hitmarker have banked on that fact.
Click to enlargeLaunching their second crowdfunding campaign and looking to raise £200,000 in exchange for 4% equity, Rich Huggan tells GGRecon about just how they will use this investment to make YOUR life easier, and get you your dream job in esports.
Who are Hitmarker?
A warm and friendly face in the cold, Hitmarker originally solved the hiring problem in esports by moving all of the English-language esports jobs found online into one cosy home. As they say themselves, now Hitmarker is well on its way to solving the hiring problem in the much larger video game industry by doing the same thing.
Managing Director Rich Huggan emulates the core mission of his company as a person – open, honest, and passionate. Hitmarker was built as a volunteer passion project by a group of friends to solve a problem in the esports community, initially founded by Rich’s brother Phillip Huggan. Phillip, as Rich says, “had been in esports forever, he founded Raven (the apparel provider), and his background is in digital design, he started off a logo/jersey designer, taught himself how to code, so became a designer/developer. He then started a couple of different esports companies, so he was behind EUeSports, which was bought by Dexerto and absorbed by them.
“He used the money, which wasn’t much, but for a 22-year-old, at the time it was a decent wedge. He used that money to set up a digital design agency for esports, and then founded Raven completely alone. He brought Sam on board six months later, and Phil and Sam lived together for a year or two, building Raven into what I think was the best UK supplier in the industry.”
So when did Hitmarker come to be? The story is one of finding a solution to a problem Phillip had himself.
“He just so happened to be working on a traditional jobs board for the sport industry called Jump In Sport, and he thought, this was late 2016, and because he’d been involved in esports and ran his own company and had to hire his own staff, he thought there’s never been a solution for an esports company to go to one place and build a team, it’s never existed. It’s been social media or Indeed or LinkedIn. So, he asked Jump In Sport’s boss for permission to replicate the design for esports, and he was totally fine with it, and he told him it wasn’t going to be a competitive service (and still isn’t).
"Phil built it in mid-2017, he enlisted three of his close friends from the FPS community to help him run it, and they all ran it in their spare time for the first few months; from May until November of 2017 it was completely a volunteer project that Phil had designed and built, and the rest of the guys were doing customer service and outreach. They were getting some good traction; The McLaren F1 team signed up, ESL signed up, Raven obviously used it, and the traction was big enough to the point where I was down in London, had a pretty decent job, was fairly happy but not really fulfilled, and he was nagging away at me saying “I think I’ve built something that has legs and is solving a problem for the esports community”. I knew esports was a thing, and I knew it was going to get big, and the timing worked out perfect; I was ready to move back to Newcastle to start a family with my now-wife, and I was looking for work – so he said: “why don’t we go into business, 50/50 partners, and launch Hitmarker as an official company”. So in November 2017 we did that, I moved home, we had, including us two, four full-time directors back at that time, but we really got down to work full-time, and over the space of the next year or two, just kept getting bigger and bigger in terms of the kind of people that were signing up and using the platform, and our social media reach, and that brings us to present day. “
Enough about history; let’s get back to YOU, reader. What do Hitmarker do now, and what will they do with this investment, to help further your career in esports?
Click to enlargeWhat Will Hitmarker do for you?
Rich understands the frustration that job-hunting can cause first hand, and uses his personal experience as a jumping-off point when it comes to finding solutions for Hitmarker’s job finders.
We have people who’ve been searching for jobs on Hitmarker for so, so long and we try to keep them motivated on social media, customer service, and on video calls. We want to make [job hunting] better for them.
Unfortunately, solving problems takes people-power, and people cost money, hence the investment. But never fear, it all goes right back to helping YOU.
Rich and the team at Hitmarker do everything they can right now to keep their nice, clean feed moderated properly, from closely checking for duplicate listings, to removing old/closed positions, but as he says, with this investment, “effectively, what we’re trying to do is put everything in the right place. [The investment] will give us more people to moderate better, but it will also pull out the region/language-specific jobs into their own home so the feed gets even cleaner in terms of like if you’re on an English website it’s just English jobs, and hopefully over time you’ll really only be seeing stuff that relevant to you in terms of location and things that you can actively apply for. I think it can be a little bit disheartening at times to be a British person, in particular, to go on Hitmarker and see “ooh 12,000 jobs” and by the time you’ve filtered down to ‘esports’ and ‘UK’ you might only be looking at 20-30 jobs.”
Definitely disheartening, and I’m sure we’ve all been there. Rich tells us the plan in the really short term following this crowdfunding campaign’s end is to roll out platforms for Brazil and Spain first, allowing those living in those regions to easily find jobs to suit them. The next step after that is even more wide-branching, their first step into the Asian market, where they plan to release platforms specifically aimed at Japan and China, a market where no such platform exists in the space yet.
Hitmarker want to solve your job-hunting (and job-posting) problems
We’ve all been there – refreshing our email inbox desperately looking for a reply, be it an offer, or a rejection, it’s the not knowing that kills us. Furthermore, if you’ve had a terrible experience with a company, how do you possibly begin to make changes in that sphere? You’re just one person, after all.
But what about the flip side? Are you a hiring manager who feels terribly guilty when you simply don’t have the time to send an email to every candidate, whether successful or not?
Never fear, Hitmarker are here.
Hitmarker wants to solve that problem for you – the problem of communication between companies and candidates during the hiring process.
Rich highlights a very interesting part of the plan for the investment – to create a Glassdoor-type review system, as “everything that happens on the website happens on the website, we don’t have any visibility into the hiring process, so as soon as you apply for a job, we are out of the process for data protection reasons, but that is an issue because sometimes some people run really bad hiring processes and have questionable parts of it, the salary might change, the contract type might not be what it says on the tin, and we lose that visibility currently.” Rich’s prospective solution for this is to “make sure the platform has some in-built accountability, kind of like a Trustpilot thing, where if the user applies for that role we can then activate their ability to review that hiring process and get some genuine feedback on how these companies are running them.”
Imagine being able to review how a company treats you during the hiring process, whether positive or negative? That would certainly weed out some of the less savoury characters in the industry – or at least highlight them.
How about those rejection emails? Rich has an answer for this too.
“What we also want to bring in is very easy automated messaging for hiring managers to use, for example, if it’s a really simple rejection because someone hasn’t attached a cover letter – it’s dead easy to click, and the user will receive that feedback. So instantly, instead of never hearing back from a company, they’ll understand that they made a mistake here on their application. The biggest user complaint we have, is never ever hearing anything back. Rejections are bad, but at least you know where you stand, and you aren’t left with this hopeless feeling. So, we as a platform need to do a better job of making that process easier.“
Their social media presence overhaul will also work to counteract this hopeless feeling, as Rich reveals Hitmarker want to use the raise to “to grow the team, hopefully by five people, very very quickly, within the first couple of months of next year. And ideally, we want to be looking at adding ten more full-time to take us to 20 full-time by the end of the following year, I think if we have that sort of capacity in-house, we can do much better on social media and get back to that much more – I think we’ve got a little bit corporate – I think we need to strip it all back and go back to being a community-focused platform that isn’t too worried about impressions and clickthroughs and engagement rate, and I think we got a bit lost in that this year, rather than our core mission which should be “to help the esports community” and specifically the people that are stuck in that horrendous job-hunting process.”
It isn’t just the industry they work with that Rich and Hitmarker want to challenge though – it’s themselves. In a refreshing tidbit of honesty in a cruel world, Rich admits that they “struggled with how best to cope with the diversity and inclusion element. When you found a company as brothers and get your closest friends to work with you, you’re five white guys.” So how will they cope with this barrier of inclusion? By dedicating more time to working with the 1,000 Dreams Fund and Black Collegiate Gaming Association, and supporting them with time and data.
We need to get better as a company in this respect – I hope this is what that raise does, challenge internal biases we might not know exist.
Click to enlargePeople = Power
Although not their phrase, Hitmarker are about “people helping people”, and the core reasons for the raise are very much about that.
Beefing up the development team is at the forefront of their mind, adding more staff to the skeleton crew of two developers to help solve those key problems we discussed, all in an effort to make YOUR life easier when searching for, applying for, and posting jobs.
“Tech-wise, we’ve got a very quick-loading, pretty-looking, lightweight platform, but there aren’t enough features yet to make people’s lives better. I think we’ve made people’s lives better by doing the hard work to get all the jobs in one place, so you don’t have to go to 12 different websites, but now, how do we make life easier to find the job that’s right for you within those 12000 that’s right for you, how do we make it easy for you to apply for that, and how do we make it easy for the hiring manager to accept you and contact you through the platform and do everything in a very clean and efficient way. But also to encourage them to give feedback if they reject you, it’s trying to fill that loop. Any improvement we make to the platform, it’ll roll out over those pod platforms. That’s what we’re really passionate about.“
So, what do you think? Hitmarker needs you, and we might just join them.
Images via Hitmarker