[Music]
Emily Gabrian: It is nice to see some familiar faces
and some new faces. I am Emily Gabrian.
I am a senior recruiter at Epic Games.
I am based out of our North Carolina office.
I am going to talk to you a little bit about our growing internship program.
I want to give you some information about
who we are, what we look for, and how you can best
engage in a dialogue with us and [indistinct].
I thought I'd start by introducing last year's class.
These were the guys and gals... It was actually all guys this year.
Anyway, ...who made up our class of 2017
at our headquarters, which is primarily where the internship program is based.
Not exclusively but primarily right now,
largely because I am only one person. [Laughing]
Also because this is where about 400 of Epic's 700 global employees are located.
That number seems to increase by the day,
so forgive me if that is wrong. [Laughing]
What most people want to know is,
"Great. How many of those people turned into an employee?"
Hey, so here are the employees or contractors that
remained on or reengaged with us after the internship program.
These are the schools they came from.
I wanted to give a special shout-out to
the universities and places we have relationships with,
and all the hard work they did together with you.
We tend to be pretty picky.
I will tell you a little bit about specifically what
we are looking for and how that evolves over time,
and then what characteristics we find
make students successful in internships at Epic.
Here is a little overview of the program.
We time it so that it is June to September only right now,
and it is primarily located in Cary, North Carolina.
We have one or two people in Bellevue and also in Guildford.
This is going to continue to expand; we will talk a little bit about this.
This is actually only the fourth year
of Epic's internship program. I know Ryan Brucks started
as an intern back when. Since since I joined
we decided to actually create a program rather than
saying this person is a little too young to hire as a full-time employee,
let's call them an intern, get them in and see what they're capable of.
Which was a little bit more like our process previously. [Laughing]
They are
vetted as any other employee is vetted through an internship process
portfolio reviews, and things along those lines.
Then, they're invited onto the team to work on features.
They are not given internship- level tasks, whatever that means.
For us, they were hired to be a developer and part of the team.
We don't restrict the levels introduced.
Over the few years we've had this program, we have primarily seen that
most of the interns tended to either be recent graduates, masters students,
or they are in their senior year of education.
I think there are a few reasons for this.
One is because it was still kind of new for Epic
to bring people on right out of school.
The more senior people were with more work and internship experience,
the more specialized they were, the more
comfortable people felt really inviting them in.
If you think about it, what you're doing is you're taking leads,
you are taking technical leads,
people who have been managing other human beings in any capacity
in addition to contributing work
and you're saying, "Great here is a student who maybe has never had a job.
Go ahead, have fun. You know what to do, right? You got this?"
[Laughing]
It has been a real learning process for all of us.
We want to make sure that when people are walking in,
they can come in and have ideas about what it is they want to accomplish,
as well as they delve into where Epic takes them.
We do provide professional development and team building events.
They get to spend a lot of time with me;
I take them to baseball games, we go bowling, and stuff like that.
We also set up lunch and learns where they get exposure to
developers across the company
and understand more about what other disciplines are doing.
They get experience working directly with the engine.
The 2018 internship list looks a little sparse.
I'm going to tell you why.
Fortnite, primarily. [Laughing]
Some of these have been posted on our website.
I will talk a little bit more about the application process.
We are no longer actively accepting applicants
through our website for the summer months.
As you know, we are getting a little close.
Does that mean that I don't want to hear about great students you have to refer
or that there is no chance anybody else could join the team?
No, absolutely not.
We are still open to that conversation.
If you have great students to recommend, I will talk to you a little
bit later in this slide about how to do that.
Right now what we have tried to do,
for trying to contain some of the madness
by making sure that anybody who joins the teams at an intern level
is joining a team that isn't in as much of a hyper critical mode
as Fortnite: Battle Royale is.
That is why you have noticed there are probably not a lot of
game design or game art
roles up right now because a lot of those teams
are gelling and shipping content all the time.
I want to make sure that we have enough space, time, and energy
to really devote to making sure that your interns have a good experience.
We had a great experience last year where we had two design interns
hit content lock during their first [laughing]
6-8 weeks of the internship.
That was an exciting experience for them.
We were like, "Great, you're a game designer.
We are in content lock, so if you could play a lot of Fortnite, it would be great.
[Audience laughing] We made better use of them, obviously.
I think they still can get experience.
One of them is still contracting with the team.
This gives you a sense
of how many different types of things we are trying to juggle,
as we do ship products regularly as part of a small team,
but also we want to remain passionate about you all and your students.
Looking ahead, I want to
be completely transparent with you about where we are headed.
Right now I am part of a team of about four or five recruiters
who work across our global studios.
There is much more help than that at the different locations we do have,
but dedicated to hiring the engine team and all of
the content creation teams and things along those lines,
down to finance people, and you name it. [laughing]
We cover all of it.
What we are really ready to do is give dedicated recruiting support
to our university relations group.
We are now posting for university relations recruiter.
This is going to be somebody... You think getting an internship at Epic is hard,
try joining as a university relations recruiter.
We are ruthless. [Laughing]
We are looking for people who have worked in similar companies
and have really built programs from the ground up.
You will have access to people who will regularly be available to come speak,
be a resource for you, work closely with our educational program,
leverage our academic partnerships,
and through that, build a stronger on-campus presence
and strong repeatable internships to our offices
such as Montreal, Salt Lake City, the growing offices in Europe,
and hopefully some of our our China and Korea offices as well.
Japan hasn't mentioned anything yet, but [indistinct]. So we will see.
I like to sign my future co-worker up for a lot of exciting opportunities.
If there is anything else he or she should be doing, let me know.
Let's get back to what we can do today.
Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about
how to survive the internship battle Royale.
You do your best to prepare students, and then throw them out into the world.
What I can tell you is not about what you
can do to make them universally acceptable
to all jobs everywhere, but I can talk to you a little bit
about what Epic specifically is looking for.
Keep that in mind as we go through our conversation.
This is mostly about where Epic is today, and what we are looking for.
Our application process. We require a portfolio.
We require code samples. We require survey responses if you're in a production
internship type of position.
No matter what it is you're doing, show us.
That is key.
The difference between a student
and a professional is really the work.
Show us their professional level of work.
They always want to know, "if I don't have the experience,
how do I get a job?"
Well, what are you doing?
People at Epic are naturally curious.
They're naturally motivated to make something and to do.
We want to see people in the early stages of their career
to share that passion, and express it in that same way.
Resume.
Keep it simple.
I can't emphasize this enough.
Keep it simple. [Laughing]
We are looking for clean information, contact information,
web links, etc. We will talk a little bit more about that in detail.
Resume and portfolio requirements.
We don't require a cover letter.
That is really reserved for another conversation.
We want the work to talk for itself.
The process is the applications are accepted through the website
or through direct referrals.
But we do try to collect everything through the website so we can track easily
and make sure that people get the level of communication they need.
Selections are generally made by or in April.
All of our applicants receive a response. They don't receive a response right away,
necessarily. I usually do once the positions have been filled.
Sometimes that can be a few months after the applications start coming in.
Everybody at some point will get that acknowledgment.
They get the acknowledgment right away that their application has been received,
and we do try to follow up with every single one of them.
What we look for.
Again, we are looking for an online portfolio
This should best work.
Anybody who has heard me talk about the best work process...
It is like if you show us strong work
and you show us weak work, we assume you don't know the difference.
It is always about showcasing where you are today
and what you are most proud of.
We assume that if you are good at a thing
that you were once less good at a thing, so you don't need to prove that to us.
[Laughing]
This seems simple, but always encourage students
to make it easy for the recruiter to get access to what is important to them.
Things like putting a link to that portfolio or to that
reel, etc. on your resume,
so I'm not hunting around in three or four places to find things.
This is always helpful in communication with my hiring managers as well.
The clean resume is what you have done at school and maybe the jobs you have held.
I don't need people to go into too much depth about the jobs they have held,
but I will tell you why this is relevant to me personally
and to what I found is successful at Epic is
that it is nice to know that somebody has been paid for a job once,
that they knew about what it meant to show up on time
and be a part of a team.
It is not a requirement,
but it is nice to know.
It is nice to know "I worked in the library", or "I was a teaching assistant",
or "I worked at Chili's during the summers".
Whatever it is, don't be afraid of who you are and what you have done,
but showcase what it is that we are looking for.
Include side projects and passionate projects,
if you think that they're valuable, or if they're interesting.
If you build robots on the side,
if you compete in cooking classes, or whatever it is,
feel free to put that on there as well because
depending on what we are looking for in the projects we have or haven't announced,
these things may become relevant.
Show us the things you're proud of, and what you're doing.
Also, we look for a passionate area of focus.
You just listened to two people who
cover a pretty broad range of skills and interests.
When we are looking for interns
who are in tools development, graphics programming,
or game design, or in particular effects art
or something along those lines, what we are really looking for
is somebody that when we point at that thing,
they're going to be hungry to sit in that discipline
and apply all the things that they have learned.
I get a lot of resumes
for say production assistant
and at the top it will say,
producer, environment artist, game designer, programmer.
I was like, "Oohh.., what do you want to be when you grow up?
Let's focus."
We need people in there who are like producers.
Great. You're passionate about project management.
You're passionate about seeing your team succeed.
You're detail-oriented.
You're not going to get bored if you're not creating content.
These are things that are important for me to know so that I can say,
"hey this person is actually really passionate about the effects art
and you can see that reflected in their portfolio.
Find an area of focus.
I think if you can help your students express
that area of focus as they apply to jobs,
that would be really helpful for Epic
because we do tend to look for people who have a stand-out area.
In the portfolio, understanding what we are looking for.
If students actually read the job description,
and I know that feels like a lot of work for most people.
[Laughing]
I would rather blanket apply, and let you tell me what I'm qualified for.
We can do that too, [laughing]
but it is really helpful if they understand what we are looking for
and that they show us that they understand that.
If you're applying for a role on Fortnite,
in environment art or something along those lines,
show us you understand what it means to create stylized characters
If you are looking at a tools programming position,
help us understand that you understand what it means to build a tool,
that you want to work in the editor,
that you're not like, "well I will apply the tools,
but I really want to be a graphics programmer".
If you want to be a graphics programmer, go [indistinct],
and come back to us. [Laughing]
We want people who are going to just
attack whatever it is that they are excited about.
and try to show you, here is the problem that we need to solve.
Can you help us solve that problem?
If you say yes, show us that in your portfolio.
Does that make sense?
You have absorbed all this. Now you know what we are looking for,
how to do it and you are like, "Great. I have a great student to recommend".
At least I hope that is what you are thinking.
In the event you have a great student you want to recommend,
recommend them.
My cards will be readily available.
A lot of our recruiting team and I will be at our booth on the show floor.
We will be at the Games, Jobs, Beer, probably less so on the beer part.
[Laughing] We will be at the jobs part of that
all week.
I think student day is Friday.
I will be there just
ready to shake hands and meet people.
We are not going to accept paper resumes,
but we are happy to receive introductions and get faces
to some of the names of applications we have had in the past.
Over time, if you are not interested in recommending someone today,
but have them build a relationship with Epic
to make sure that when these students do emerge,
there is a place to set them.
Right now the best place to send them is just email me.
Let's start that conversation.
Let's figure out how do we build something that
keeps you connected to what Epic is doing,
and keeps us connected to what is happening in your programs.
The more information I have about what is important to your school
what is important to your students, and what is important to you,
the better I know how to engage with you.
Let's figure out how we can start those conversations
and just knowing that one day
you will have to deal with somebody who is probably far more talented
and has much more time than I do. [Laughing]
But Epic is really passionate, as you can tell,
about making sure that we can have an effective dialogue
about how we connect and we make amazing emerging talent
to real world jobs.
Email me.
Find me at the booth,
and let's see where we can start.
But in the meantime too, here are some other ways you can help your students.
Knowing what is happening in the industry,
including what tools and what company activity is happening.
Stay up-to-date.
Pass that information along to students; teach them how to get that information.
I find that really, really valuable.
I still have a students apply
that say, "I want to work on the Gears of War team".
[Indistinct] I know you do.
[Laughing]
Understand who you're in a conversation with.
It can help you be set up for success.
Teaching best practices about applying for jobs,
and helping people apply for things that they are qualified for.
Applying to the
rendering programmer internship and
the creative services art director job
is probably not going to be your best foot forward.
Teaching them about the fact that that all of those things matter.
Networking early and often, even while you're still in school.
I have so many amazing success stories
of people who
started a conversation either at GDC or
in an on-campus talk
and they weren't quite ready for anything but over time, we kept in touch.
I still have have people that I met for fifteen minutes
five years ago who are still sending me updates to their portfolios.
Maybe I don't have something for them,
but it is fun to connect them over to someplace else or make a referral.
Teach them about how to really effectively build those relationships
not only with recruiters,
but with other developers and with people they're excited about meeting.
One of the beautiful things about the industry
is just that
you can contact your heroes.
They're accessible in places like this.
Teaching students about the value of
making those connections,
and attending this event.
Thank you for being here.
Keep inspiring great people to do great work.
I know that what you all do is really
emotionally and intellectually challenging.
I just want to let you know how grateful we are
that you continue to do it everyday.
This is us.
I realized this is the first slide deck I
have put together in probably five years without a meme.
I apologize for that. [Audience laughing]
I'm really sorry.
Find us. That is our career site.
Follow us on social media.
[Applause]
[Music]