Joe Hills is the Founder of Looking for Group, Esports’ first executive search specialist. LFG is positioned to attract high potential talent from in and outside the industry for start-up organisations to established industry leaders. Joe spoke at the TEO Esports Exchange in 2016 and will be leading the Talent Management Panel at the eSCon Europe Conference in London 5th – 6th April.

As the tsunami wave of non-endemic investment, soaring player salaries and professionalization continues to crash on the “ten year overnight success” that is the Esports industry, one discipline of corporate expertise is creeping into relevance: the area of functionality that is HR.

We are seeing progress with the recent announcement of RektJobs’ esports specific job board and talent management becoming a larger focus on the conferencing circuit. However, the quality of HR functions (be they sourcing, onboarding, employee engagement and workflow analysis) continue to be lacking almost universally. Now, I’m not starting to insinuate that HR should be the top priority of every fledgling or established Esports organisation. Of course, developing a well-positioned product offering, building commercial momentum or putting on best in class events should be the main focus for respective organisations. What I am saying is that HR needs an increasing focus to ensure the development of new ideas and a broadening perspective on operations through non-endemic senior leadership who can teach Esports organisations a lesson or two.

Before we dive in to the state of HR specifically, let’s take a step back and analyse what we are discussing. Human resources, like the finance department, serves the shareholders directly. Its base function is to maintain and improve the shareholder investment in their employee resources. The value of HR soars as an organisation grows more complex and requires more oil to slicken the proverbial gears.

In Esports today, HR seems to simply embody sourcing high potential talent. For whatever reason, gamers with HR experience are rarer than leprechauns riding a flying pig. Perhaps recruitment or HR management is not sexy enough to attract the passionate gamer who may rather get stuck into game development, marketing or events production. We can also point to HR being 70% dominated by female professionals, whereas only 15% of players are women; a potential passion barrier for an industry where women are not represented? When taking a historical view, HR only recently became data driven over the last 5-10 years, therefore maintaining a reputation of being a soft skillset and potentially out of touch with a more millennial mindset. You only should look at the progress of marketing vs human resources functions globally from the 1950s to see how marketing soared into one of the largest areas of investment once it went analytical in line with a more digital world. This has led to a crisis in more mature organisations who need passionate HR staff who understand and love the product. Gaming and Esports is not everyone’s bag of tricks and understanding in-game jargon, industry trends and being able to empathise with potential candidates’ gaming journey is crucial to correctly identifying high potential gamer executives from those who are looking to make some fast cash on Esports being the next big thing.

The senior executive hiring process is firstly fulfilled by recommendations from the leadership team’s network, secondly by internal sourcing teams and thirdly by external search firms. If these sourcing teams are already overworked (with only a few Esports/gaming literate recruiters), then the whole hiring and onboarding process starts to slow and grind to a halt. Being able to cherry pick the best talent who are excited about Esports is crucial to staying ahead of the industry growth curve which seems to change the landscape of the industry on an almost biannual basis. It’s not difficult to see the level of competition for similar senior candidates to skyrocket as this issue persists; in fact, several of my candidates are consistently being pulled in a variety of directions between Riot, ESL, EA and Blizzard for increasingly similar opportunities. It’s fantastic for candidate choice, not so much for the organisations’ themselves.

If hiring is HR Esports present, then its future is employee engagement: the property of the relationship between an organisation and its employees. An engaged employee is one that has fully bought into and passionate about their work and therefore takes positive actions to further the organisations’ reputation and interests. This concept became wider spread in the 2000s and has been a go-to buzzword of global consultancy firms such as PwC and Deloitte when assessing the biggest needle movers of organisational change.

But how does employee engagement correspond to Esports? Well, the industry is dominated by millennials and almost cursed by a more transactional candidate experience; more and more senior executives are embracing the millennial career path and jumping ship every year or so to greener pastures which build on their previous experience. These come in the form of a more senior position in an emerging startup or a more lateral move to a competitor with more space for growth. The collective mindset is less about a creative and fun environment, and more based around where the role will get them in 12/24 months’ time. Therefore, a more refined form of employee engagement is required for Esports, one that must encompass a challenging environment which rewards competent employees with more opportunity to grow personally and professionally, not just financially.

In larger organisations, a continuous feedback loop can be established for all personnel, even newcomers. An example of this kind of solution can be found in Questback, a SaaS engagement organisation based out of Oslo, Norway. I previously partnered with Questback before my Esports journey began and their product offered a continuous process of feedback from sourcing, onboarding and throughout the employee lifecycle to measure satisfaction, challenge and overall synergy between the employee and company’s vision for the future. The ongoing and organic process of monitoring engagement has huge impacts on the organisation by raising early red flags for key performers which can be actioned upon as well as improving the overall working culture by simply allowing an open self-analytical dialogue to form for the employee and organisation alike. I am a big believer in emotional intelligence and empathy being the most important soft skill for any successful executive to embody; employee engagement is emotional intelligence in action.

With tier 1 Esports leaders and maturing startups looking to learn lessons from the world of music and sport, the state of HR has never been more relevant. There is a relative gold rush of talent taking Esports seriously in 2017 and organisations must be well supported to stand out and make their opportunities irresistible to the market. Perhaps there is no quick fix to the lack of gamers in HR to plug the functional gap. Maybe the responsibility is on the market leaders to establish ‘centres of excellence’ for HR to build a strategy of nurturing HR practices from the top down or increasing Esports organisations’ presence at university hiring fairs the world over. All we can be certain of is that more teething issues will be exposed as Esports continues to mature and these can only be solved by utilising the tried and tested expertise from more established industries as a foundation to innovate from and make Esports the biggest and best we possibly can.