Let Jobs Find You: Building a Online Presence
Strategically building an online presence has many advantages. There are many wonderful game development communities where you can build relationships, skills, and hyper-specific meme collections, and by being on the websites where recruiters and hiring managers search for potential candidates to source, you increase the chances of someone noticing you without you having to apply to anything or send your portfolio to anyone.
How To Make Yourself Easy for Recruiters to Find
When searching for potential candidates to approach for job openings, there are a relatively small number of websites that recruiters and hiring managers search. So, being on these websites is a great way to passively increase your chances of getting noticed. And aside from, y’know, actually creating the work and gaining the skills to fill these out, many of the ways to ensure that you’re easily found by people who might want to hire you are relatively low-effort.
LinkedIn is often the go-to place for recruiters (at least USA-based ones) to look for candidates to reach out to.
Have an up-to-date profile including contact information, portfolio links, skill summary, and work history with details similar (or identical) to those on your resume.
You just need the profile presence there, you don’t need to be at all engaged with the community. However, if you want to then it’s one more place to share newly-finished portfolio pieces with an increased likelihood that they’ll wind up in front of recruiters.
Use Portfolio Communities
Community websites such as ArtStation or GitHub might seem like an easy way to get lost in the crowd, but because they’re relatively purpose-built, they’re actually the most searchable way to have your work found.
It’s still totally okay to have a personal website, but search engines are so oversaturated that there’s no way for you to be found organically there.
Contact Info on EVERYTHING
Include your Full Name, E-mail, and Portfolio URL on/in everything you upload.
What’s “everything”? Every image, gif, document, profile… everything.
You generally don’t need more than those three - it’ll just be clutter.
Your LinkedIn is generally unnecessary, but include it if you’re in a discipline that doesn’t really use portfolios (see next section).
Donnnn’t put info somewhere incredibly obnoxious that obscures parts of the art unless you’ve legitimately been getting your art stolen. Just put it in a nice lil’ corner where it’s easy to read.
Put your full name in your filenames as well, heck it.
Contact Info on EVERYTHING
Include your Full Name, E-mail, and Portfolio URL on/in everything you upload.
What’s “everything”? Every image, gif, document, profile… everything.
You generally don’t need more than those three - it’ll just be clutter.
Your LinkedIn is generally unnecessary, but include it if you’re in a discipline that doesn’t really use portfolios (see next section).
Donnnn’t put info somewhere incredibly obnoxious that obscures parts of the art unless you’ve legitimately been getting your art stolen. Just put it in a nice lil’ corner where it’s easy to read.
Put your full name in your filenames as well, heck it.
How to
LinkedIn are compilations of your best work within your discipline, and are an integral part of the application materials for many careers, especially in visual art and audio. It’s right up there with your name, role, and how to contact you in terms of essential employer information, and in many cases will be the first thing people see or look at. There’s also a lot of mixed or outdated information and easy temptations to fall prey to as you’re making one, so let’s talk about how to get the most bang for your buck out of what’s often the single most important part of your application.
Good news: it’s probably to put less work into it than you thought you needed to.
Treat Your Profile How You’d Want to be Introduced To a Potential Employer
The “introduction” element is key here: this will
For your header section and contact info, use a professional-looking photo of yourself for your profile photo - whether or not you use a background image is totally optional, but your favorite piece of portfolio art or a promotional image from your most recent or favorite project are all good options.
Your Contact Info should include your e-mail address and portfolio link - you can also include relevant social media links if your presence there is a reasonably professional one.
You don’t need to include your phone number, birthday, or address - those are more likely than anything to just be used to creep on you or make assumptions, and they just create clutter.
The Featured section is great for sharing portfolio pieces or projects.
For your Experience, treat it the same way you would your resume: keep it concise, but go beyond the obvious facts of a role by highlighting your specific accomplishments, contributions or improvements as well as what you uniquely brought to the role.
You can detail any entries in your Education the same as you would an entry in your experience. Most people won’t scroll past your Experience, or your Education if you have very little experience listed, so you don’t need to stress nearly as much about things like your Skills, Recommendations, or Interests.
Add Connections Organically and With Sincerity
I cannot emphasize this enough: don’t snub your fellow entry-level peers.
It’s also totally okay to add people you don’t personally know or have only met briefly, but for the love of all that’s decent, don’t use a stock connection invitation. If you only met briefly, remind them how you met. If you haven’t met, briefly explain why you’d like to connect.
Share Your Work and Portfolio Updates!
Since LinkedIn is heavy on recruiters and hiring managers, it’s a great place to share your work and potentially have it seen by more professionals and prospective employers! Sharing recently-completed portfolio pieces, projects, game jams, etc. are all great, as are announcements when you’ve been accepted for, are starting, or completed/about to complete a mentorship, internship, class, or role (including contract roles!), or you’ve received an award, scholarship, or other distinguishment.
These posts don’t need to be long - just a sentence or two to share some context or an element you’re particularly excited about or proud of is generally plenty.
You can also use a few relevant hashtags to increase the chance that someone’ll find your work that way - it’s not something I see utilized a ton in searches but it’s also pretty innocuous.
You Don’t Need to Spend a Ton of Time On There (it’s probably better if you don’t)
Every once in a while someone asks if they need to be active/engaged with LinkedIn’s community/feed in order to get points for being on LinkedIn.
Short answer: Nope! In fact, I’d specifically recommend not spending much time on there.
The biggest benefit you’ll get out of LinkedIn is being easy to find - keep your work experience, contact info, and featured works up-to-date, build up your game dev address book, share updates if you want to. Beyond those basics, it’s very unlikely to be a better use of your time than simply improving your core skills.
While this doesn’t have to be your attitude towards it, most game devs I know view LinkedIn as something of a necessary evil or an aggressive address book, so it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll be combing your post history to make sure you’re appropriately active.
Give the same kind of support to others that you would hope for from them: like, compliment/comment on, and share the work and updates of others when you feel it’s appropriate. Give feedback if it’s requested. Etc. You don’t have to - shouldn’t, honestly - spend a lot of time doing this, but make sure that you’re being a good neighbor to your peers.
Portfolio Basics and Tips
Portfolios are compilations of your best work within your discipline, and are an integral part of the application materials for many careers, especially in visual art and audio. It’s right up there with your name, role, and how to contact you in terms of essential employer information, and in many cases will be the first thing people see or look at. There’s also a lot of mixed or outdated information and easy temptations to fall prey to as you’re making one, so let’s talk about how to get the most bang for your buck out of what’s often the single most important part of your application.
Good news: it’s probably to put less work into it than you thought you needed to.
Unless You’re a Graphic Designer, I Don’t Want You To Make a Fancy-Pants Portfolio Website!
You. Do Not. Need. A Personal. Website. Seriously, save all that time and effort for the pieces going into the portfolio.
Maybe that idea is really making you nervous because your teacher or some forum post told you you won’t be taken seriously unless you have a personal, from-scratch portfolio website - the advice is out-of-date, at least in the USA and by the measure of every recruiter and hiring manager I’ve talked to. It was true at one point, especially when there were fewer readymade hosting options and generalists were more sought-after, but most people have long since moved on to just being concerned with the quality of your work and having the easiest possible time viewing it (both things that non-standard formats and diverting time to learning to build a website typically make harder). Buy the YourNameDotCom domain and redirect it to your GitHub or ArtStation, if it brings you peace. I give you permission. You’re free.
So with that, here are some super easy, industry-standard places to show off your work for free with zero need to create a format, reformat for mobile, etc.:
Image Galleries
Common For:
2D and Concept Art, 3D Art, UI Design
Popular Hosts:
ArtStation, Behance, SketchFab
Image galleries are often as simple as collections of static images - frequently one of more final/beauty shots plus any detail or process images you want to show off. Depending on the specifics of the piece of display, these may also include other media such as 3D model embeds like SketchFab, or videos or gifs.
Very broadly speaking, ArtStation and Behance seem to be more popular in different areas of the world - so if you’re willing to work globally, use both!
Demo Reel Videos
Common For:
Animation, VFX, Audio, Technical Art
Popular Hosts:
ArtStation, Behance, Youtube, Vimeo
Demo reels (sometimes also called sizzle reels) are short (ideally sub-3-minute) compilation videos showing off your motion- or audio-dependent work. Unless highly technical, these tend to be less focused on thorough breakdowns than image galleries for times’ sake.
If you’re using Youtube or Vimeo, I still strongly encourage you to crosspost to ArtStation or Behance. Youtube and Vimeo are both super-saturated and difficult to browse organically.
Code Repository
Common For:
Engineering, Technical Art
Popular Hosts:
GitHub
If you’re writing code, GitHub tends to be the go-to place to store, organize, and display your work.
While not built as a portfolio-first website like ArtStation, it has become a common part of an engineer’s online presence and prospective employers may search for one even if you aren’t linking to it directly. (So learn from the Tech Art intern who got flat-footed during his interview for his Amazon NH Switch-scraper titled “I just want to play Animal Crossing on a cute Switch, fuck.”)
No Standard Format :’)
Common For:
Game Design, Production, QA
Popular Hosts:
Text Editors, LinkedIn
Some game disciplines just… don’t have a standard portfolio template or even a reason to use portfolios at all. If you’re in a position where you don’t have a clear reason to build a portfolio, you’ll instead be investing that time into making an extremely kick-ass resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn.
General portfolio tips no matter what platform you’re using:
These are pretty universally true, aside from the one about image sizes (but the people most dependent on their portfolios are visual artists, so they get a “universal” bullet point as a treat). The tl;dr of all of this is: get your best work in front of viewers immediately, in the easiest-to-view format possible. Zero barriers or clicks between them and the work unless absolutely necessary.
Show your best work, not all your work.
Curation is a critical skill in creating your portfolio - it shows that you can assess your work objectively, and it keeps your portfolio clean, easy, and quick to navigate.
Make it ridiculously easy to see your work.
Make your portfolio front-and-center and link directly to the page/video/gallery you want prospective employees to see. Your work should be the first thing they see, whether you’ve linked them to it or they’re stumbling across it in a search. Videos for your main work are great - they can be much higher quality than gifs, and allow us to slow down or scrub through details if we want. Embedded gifs are great for solo loops of VFX and fleshing artistic or technical details of your process/piece.
Display the biggest possible images/videos as the embedded pieces.
These days, that ideally means going for at least 720 or 1080p on all images or videos.
I'm fine with clicking to enlarge for bonus detail (especially if I can click/swipe to the next image in fullscreen), but if your pieces either can’t be expanded, or don’t have enough resolution to see all the details, both of us are going to be sad.
Avoid any host that requires or even might require a login or membership.
Even an implied login requirement (i.e. a non-obviously skippable popup) can be dodgy here, because hiring managers are really busy and having to not only take the time to sign up for something but also probably be signing ourselves up to have to unsubscribe from a bunch of marketing e-mails sucks.
Some examples here: SyncSketch, Dropbox, Instagram, and Google Drive can all either require or implicitly require a log-in or have unreliable permissions (for example, Google ).
Password-protect things only if truly necessary.
It’s one more hurdle for the people reviewing your work, and one where simple mistakes can completely prevent us from seeing your stuff. If you do have some really strong work that can't be made public, pleeease make sure the password is cited in your cover letter, resume, and anywhere else possible in your application. If we can't easily find the password it's very possible we just won't look, because we probably have hundreds of applications left to go through and can’t spend time guessing it.
Avoid requiring downloads whenever possible.
This is more likely to be a gotcha for designers than VFX or most other disciplines, but if you have a game or demo you want people to play through, if at all possible, have it be playable in-browser. Whether or not you can do that, include a brief playthrough video or highlight gifs on the page as well - not everyone will play even brief browser-embedded demos, and this way they’ll see the highlights of your in-game work no matter what (it may even be enough to change their mind and play the game).
Utilize the Casualness of Online Communities and Social Media
A portfolio, pretty much by definition, should be showcasing your best work and representation of your skills, but finishing a beautiful showpiece is a very small part of the time you’ll spend making stuff. Vanishing into your cave for weeks or months until you can reemerge with a single spectacular piece is pretty lonely though, and means there are a lot less opportunities for you to establish yourself as part of your discipline’s community or build up an online presence as a potential hire.
Twitter, Discord servers, forums, or other informal, discoverable places can be a fantastic place to post your works-in-progress, art or technical experiments, things you did for fun with no intention of them being portfolio-worthy, all that kind of stuff.
If you’re posting these non-portfolio pieces, especially across different channels, it’ll create way more touchpoints for you to show up on people’s radars and build up a community around you. It also leaves a paper trail for all the work and learning you’re doing, which can be a great advantage during job hunts, as it reinforces your love of your craft, continued learning and breadth, and helps to bulk out your actual portfolio without having to put things other than your best work in the portfolio itself.
Great for casual, regular, or WIP uploads; because it's informal, you can use it to keep up a steady feed of WIPs, tiny pieces and experiments, etc. to show off your learning and improvement outside portfolio pieces.
Often a good place to meet people in your discipline/build community - one of the modern variants of the dreaded Networking. (Also, friends.:))
TBD on how well this advice ages since I’m transcribing this post two days after Musk bought Twitter.
Discord Communities
Many game dev servers on Discord are focused on getting feedback and helping each other.
Like Twitter, often a good place to meet people in your discipline.
Feedback is one of the best ways to improve quickly, and there are often professionals in these communities as well - put your work out there even if it's scary!
Someone probably knows how to fix that weird bug of yours.
Seeing others' work helps you gauge your own skill level more objectively.
Forums/ Online Communities
Culturally these tend to be pretty similar to Discord communities, with the same emphasis on, but they're much easier to search for past posts and content in.
Threads can be more useful for showing your progress over time or a larger project compared to Discord.
May or may not contain more veteran game devs, because we're old and stuck in our ways.
You can post the same stuff in both, it's okay.:)
Many have job boards as well!
