How a Super-Focused Resume Will Get the Attention of AAA Studios

Can you imagine being so intensely focused on mastery of one life skill that you never even learned to turn on a stove?

I’d like to introduce you to Mikhail Tal, incompetent cook and Russian chess Grandmaster. His peers regarded him as a creative chess genius who combined improvisation and unpredictability into a daring attack-focused style. It’s been said that “every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem.”

Tal’s level of focus was so intense that when his wife was asked how it affected his daily life, she replied “Misha was so ill-equipped for living… When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn’t even pack his own suitcase… He didn’t even know how to turn on the gas for cooking.”

While your level of focus doesn’t need to be quite at the level of Mikhail Tal to get hired by a AAA game studio, removing the extraneous from your resume will help grab the attention of your favorite companies. Let’s look at three ways we can apply his lessons to craft your super-focused resume

Focus only on a single audio skill
Utilize keywords from job descriptions
Be cognizant of your reader’s time

AAA studios hire for a single role.

When starting out, it’s tempting to want to indulge all of your interests and combine them into a single career. But, AAA studios rarely hire composer/sound designer/implementer/voice actor/programmers. Even if you have a vast skill set, large studios tend to be fairly rigid in their hiring structures. It’s only after you’ve been hired that specialties in your skills set become recognized or even desired.

As difficult as it is, you vastly increase the odds of being hired when you dedicate yourself to a single role. Saying “I compose” or “I design sounds” instantly perks the ears of those respective teams, as they have a specific need within their team to fill which, to them, doesn’t cross over.

Don’t worry – I know you’re still interested in more than just one thing – I’m going to cover that in a minute.

AAA studios are looking for specific skills per role.

The place where this is information is clearly identified is in the job description itself. I used to believe that using “job description keywords” was silly recruiting coordinator talk, until I went about having to hire someone. For the hiring manager, giving everyone a fair shot is placed at odds with needing to continue development, fight daily fires, and hire someone quickly.

You’re going to be tempted to “sell yourself” and throw in every possible skill that you think the hiring manager might find advantageous – even if it’s not what they’re asking for. It may be fine to include some of those things, but without a doubt you need to be focusing on the keywords of the job description and showing your aptitude with them on your resume and cover letter.

For example, if you see words or phrases like Wwise, foley, storytelling, creatures, ambience, magical spells, sound-to-picture editing, studio recording, Max/MSP, Reaktor, and Scripting – take note! The more that you can showcase those specific skills in your resume and cover letter (and yes, use their wording!), the more figurative “points” you score as you’re removing the need for the hiring manager to “read into” your abilities on paper.

Hiring managers rarely have time.

Many of you are familiar with the idea that audio is the last thing thought about for any entertainment work – games are no different. By the time the audio team is approved for a hire in AAA, they’ve often needed that person for quite a while.

You should be doing everything in your power to remove the need for a hiring manager to hunt for your demos or find any content you wish to share. If you add links to game demos, it’s unlikely that they’ll get downloaded and played. It’s also possible that your game will crash or not work on their machine. You can solve this problem easily by providing video captures on YouTube instead.

Having some awareness of what really matters to a position is hugely beneficial as well. While it may be part of your life that you were once a cook or tennis instructor, and that you share your thoughts on Twitter – removing everything that’s not immediately important makes the things that are important stand out more.

“But Adam…” you say, “I don’t want to limit myself to sound design!”

Having been a Technical Sound Designer myself – I’m right there with you. I like sound and code. So, good news – from my experience, you can usually adopt multiple hats and skills within a team after you get in the door. While it’s not often that I see audio folks in AAA doing both music and sound design – I’ve seen people design and code, compose and do cinematic mixing, etc.

But, before you adopt multiple hats, the best way to start with AAA is only putting on one. Once you’ve earned the trust of your coworkers and start saving the day in special ways that only you can do – they will dogpile onto your additional expertise.

So, start by being more focused on the problem at hand the studio is dealing with than you are trying to “impress” the studio with your limitless abilities. Applying empathy and understanding first is usually the best way to go!

In summary.

Crafting an attention-grabbing resume can be much easier than you think, so long as you apply focus. You improve it quickly by going through three steps:

Focus only on a single audio skill
Utilize keywords from job descriptions
Be cognizant of your reader’s time

You don’t need to be good at everything.

I like to imagine that Mikhail Tal left this earth ever knowing how to play checkers. While checkers and chess are both board games – he grabbed people’s attention from just one.

So pay attention to Tal’s example: choose one path, craft your resume around it, and people will notice.

Now, come hang out with me.

I’ve been quietly streaming on Twitch for the last few weeks after discovering that I absolutely love the platform. I stream plugin development (and learning!) every weekend, and I’d love for you to join me.

This weekend’s stream is going to happen Sunday, August 23rd at 2:00pm Pacific Time at https://twitch.tv/adamtcroft. I’ll be learning how to build a delay VST/AU plugin, and I’d love to have you join me.