It’s harder than ever for small business owners to find the right workers. The Battle for Talent series looks at hiring difficulties in several sectors and offers solutions.

Open this photo in gallery Employees at Digital Extremes, a video game company in London, Ont., work on the product. From left, Geoff Crookes, Rebecca Ford, Steve Sinclair and Scott McGregor.

Heidi Flynn, director of human resources at Digital Extremes, knows what the London, Ont.-based gaming company is looking for in a developer these days: pretty much near the impossible.

“We look for people who are fiercely, fiercely independent, but also highly collaborative,” she explains, before chuckling when the incongruity is pointed out to her. “I mean, you couldn’t ask for two more different things, right? Yeah, it’s a hard fit to find, for sure.”

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Or, to put it another way, Ms. Flynn is the first to admit that, even if the 300-employee company wasn’t competing for talent with mega-gaming corporations in the United States, recruiting talented game designers, animators, programmers, developers and artists would be a challenge at the best of times.

Jobs are both specialized and complex. There’s also often artistry involved. Ms. Flynn, who spent about 20 years in research and development before taking on the HR job in the gaming industry, says game play programming requires a completely unique skill set compared with someone in IT with a general background in, say, programming languages C++ or Java. Companies like Digital Extremes have to be on the lookout for digital artists who specialize in, say, atmospheric lighting that, as a recent job posting states, “communicates mood, storytelling and game play.”

What’s more, because the company’s flagship game, Warframe, has already been in existence for about five years, being an artistic superstar isn’t enough. Any new hires have to feel comfortable working on a project that requires them to balance exploring their own artistic style while staying inside existing boundaries.

Then there’s the fact that the company is located in London, a small city with a population of roughly 384,000, dropped deep in farming country in Southwestern Ontario. Not exactly California or Japan, two gaming hot spots, or even Toronto and Vancouver, for that matter – although the company recently opened an office in Irvine, Calif.

Open this photo in gallery Aidan Warlow, front, and Helen Heikkila at work at Digital Extremes.

“It’s challenging, but we’ve gotten very creative with our strategies to make it work for the organization,” says Ms. Flynn, adding that today the company likes to talk up its small-city roots, where real estate prices are lower than those found in larger urban centres – even with a recent surge in demand locally. It’s still possible to find a typical family home for $375,000 in the London area, something that potential employees with young families appreciate.

New hires might be from outside Canada, too. Digital Extremes has been recruiting from all around the world – Russia, Spain, the United States, Germany and a handful of people from Britain recently.

But Ms. Flynn says looking beyond Canada’s borders may not be quite as crucial in the future. She’s noticed that more universities and colleges in Canada are launching game-development programs, and there’s been a recent boom of new graduates with the specialized skills she’s looking for coming onto the scene now.

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Still, that new cohort of grads may add some recruitment pressure on existing gaming companies anyway. According to Jodi Tilley, a professor and one of the co-ordinators for the game development program at Algonquin College in Ottawa, a sizable minority of graduates decides to eschew jobs with smaller, mid-sized and large employers entirely. Instead they’re starting tiny, indie startup companies themselves with dreams of expanding.

“You know, Steam Direct, Microsoft or Sony – they all have portals now that actually allow people without a lot of capital, newcomers, to publish their games,” she says. “Not everyone is coming out of our program and going the traditional route of job hunting the way they used to.”

Companies such as Digital Extremes are actually looking for new recruits with an entrepreneurial spirit. Ms. Flynn says side projects and independently created games are a real plus and work in the candidates favour when she’s deciding on which one to hire.

But finding them and drawing them away from their own gigs can be a challenge, Ms. Tilley says. She recommends meeting these possible recruits at local gaming events and networking there.

Like London, Ottawa’s own gaming community is small in comparison to places like Toronto. Representatives from local companies come to meet-ups and presentations where they can have dinner or grab a pint with gaming students and graduates, along with more experienced designers and developers.

“It’s one thing to advertise on your website that you’re hiring, but another thing to actually go out and meet potential recruits and talk to them in a relaxed setting,” Ms. Tilley says.

She also recommends visiting larger events farther afield. For instance, the Level Up Showcase in Toronto runs each spring and allows gaming students to show off what they’ve been working on. About 2,000 attendees show up.

“For industry, it’s basically a place where they can go one night and see all the potential grads for the academic year. They can play their games, talk to the students, see what their interests are – and see if it’s a match for their particular company,” she says.

Events like these are also good places to discuss why working for a small company might be the best fit for some recruits. Unlike larger companies that often require even more specialized skills to fill positions, such as environmental modelling versus character modelling, employees in small companies are more likely to become jacks-of-all-trades and learn many skills on the job.

Open this photo in gallery Digital Extremes offers employees a cafeteria and meal plan. At right, Jim Leedham, Warframe Xbox One programmer.

Although Digital Extremes has done what it can to entice the best and brightest to work for the company – it offers incentives such as a meal program and employee social time – the main reason people want to work for the company requires little recruiting at all: Gamers like to work for games they like playing such as The Darkness II and Retro Pinball. And with Warframe hitting 40-million registered users now, convincing people to move to London isn’t as hard.

“Recruitment gets easier each year as the game continues to gain more and more momentum,” Ms. Flynn says. “That’s still the biggest driver.”