Hello everyone, here is my data and statistics summary report of my 2-month long job search. If you are not into data and statistics, you might not find this post much interesting. Nonetheless it is very informative and lightweight with small comments about my journey that I have not commented so far. Also, there is not that much data and statistics to begin with, so you will likely enjoy reading through it. This blog post along with the one that I am planning to make next week, are intended to help others juniors that are trying to get in the video game industry.
During this post, I will not name any company or studio at all nor make any distinction between locations. This is just a global summary report of what my job searching process was in Spain and its results. I do not want to indirectly bash against anyone since this is not my goal.
225 video game companies
I contacted 225 video game companies and studios out of the 483 approximate ones that exist here in Spain (total number extracted from Devuego). This represents a percentage of 46.58%. Originally, I had a list of 250 companies but due to second thoughts, I ended up subtracting it 25 companies.
As a reminder, I only did search on the most important areas in Spain. These zones are Catalonia, Community of Madrid, Andalusia and the Valencian Community. They make up to a 73.13% of all video game businesses in Spain with a grand total of 332.
3 companies that I could not contact (1.33% of 225)
This section belongs to companies and studios that did not have any email or contact information listed on their website. This only happened with big companies but I also did find some smaller companies that they had misspelled their email address or any similar problems which I noticed and told them about it.
222 actually contacted video game studios (98.67% of 225)
I spent between 20 and 30 minutes to send each self-application. I like giving my best in everything so I needed time to search and learn more about each site. As you can see, it took me a lot of work and time. I have to say that it was indeed a very arduous and boring but necessary task to perform. However, not all of them went as great as expected because I noticed that at least I botched 2 self-applications. There is always that chance that you missed something out and it is too late to change it back.
183 unanswered emails (82.43% of 222)
I am not surprised at all with the number of unanswered emails. A big part from it comes from the fact that I mainly sent self-applications to said companies and studios, as I have stated several times. The other portion comes from the “bad” and very carefree work culture that I believe Spain overall has. There is a reason why we have such a big unemployment rate in this country. Plus let’s not forget that lots of professionals immigrate to other more prosperous countries.
4 bot answered emails (1.80% of 222)
This part of my data and statistics report counts bot replies which consequently have not been replied by a human. To be honest, I was expecting a much higher percentage. Although, it also makes sense because there are around 210 indie video game studios (43.48% of 483) and they probably do not receive much emails to spend resources on making a bot.
35 human answered emails (15.77% of 222)
I may have complained about the work culture from Spain, but I have to say that I was not expecting this high percentage of answers. I at maximum thought that I would only get around 10% of responses. Not sure how much has my 20-30 minutes self-applications boosted my percentage but I do believe that it has by a lot. A great amount of different answers told me that they liked my customized email.
24 responses of not hiring (73.53% of 34)
So basically, the most common answer that I got is that the current studio or company is not hiring. Since I had been sending mostly self-applications, it was the expected answer.
5 responses of other reasons (14.71% of 34)
The negative response includes all kinds of different reasons. From simply being not a suitable candidate to more extremes like the studio is closing down. This forms all companies or studios that did not grant me any interview or skill tests, just a plain rejection.
3 awaiting further replies (8.82% of 34)
This applies to the emails that have been answered but have not given a definite answer and will answer later. Whether they end up doing it or not, it is out of my jurisdiction, but I can always remind them. For all 184 companies and studios that did not answer me, I did not bother sending them another email.
1 skill test given (2.94% of 34)
The furthest we could say that I have got. I never received a formal answer of my status after submitting said test even though I have contacted them several times but I will keep insisting. There is something that I really would like to know from my skill test. I explained more or less how it went like here on this LinkedIn post.
Summary
I was quite self aware that I was very likely not going to succeed on my mission to get a job as a junior video game programmer. However, knowing that I still went along with it because if there was any chance at all for me to achieve my goal whatever the possibility was, I had to try and go for it. Also, there is a lot of hidden perks in doing what I did like getting in contact with important individuals while also letting yourself know about the world so they might contact you back in the future once they are looking for people to hire. You always have to think on both short and long term.
Overall this has been a very interesting and learning experience but very boring and time consuming. On the good side, I will likely not need to do such a thing on a big scale anytime soon. Hopefully, you have enjoyed reading through all this post. I intentionally did not delve into data and statistics too much since to begin with I did not have much. If by any chance you did not know me, you can learn more about me and check some of my projects.
