Ok, ok, I know... that title is a little clickbait-y, but it does sort of boil down how this ended up working out for me. This is a post I wrote in 2019 detailing the resume “loot chest” that I created to try and get my foot in the door with Gearbox, after seeing them post that they were looking for a community manager back in 2013. I always laugh to myself about how I saw the posting and my first thought was: "Oh, I could figure out how to do that", but to my credit, I did! I’ve made minimal edits to keep it true to how I was thinking back then. Hope you enjoy it!
In late 2013, I was working in a warehouse in Nashville, TN. It sucked. After about two years, I’d learned to get used to the idea of sweating my ass off in the summer, and freezing my ass off in the winter. At one point, I sustained a back injury that stills nags me to this day. For the most part, the people I worked with were cool (accept for the warehouse manager, Dan, who was a jerk), but still, not a very happy time. A friend of mine had helped me land the job and while I was grateful, it was pretty clearly not the place for me.
One day, during a break, I checked Facebook and noticed that my favorite game studio on the face of the planet, Gearbox Software, had posted that they were looking for a community manager. I immediately started to think about how cool it would be to have a job like that — working around games that I enjoyed everyday, and around like-minded people who were creative and driven.
The break ended and we all got back to work. I was stocking shelves alongside a co-worker of mine who was a cool guy and also a bit of a gamer. I told him about the posting and how I was thinking of applying. I mean, I figured, why not? They’d see that I had no experience, lived in Nashville, and was really nothing more than a fan, and that would be it, right? Still, I’m the kind of person that, when I put my mind to something, I can sometimes go to kind of crazy lengths to accomplish a goal — even if the goal itself is kind of crazy. I had nothing to lose, so I was determined to give it a shot.
Now, this next part is important, so pay attention. I told my friend about the posting, and about my plans to go for it. Without meaning to be, he was pretty discouraging. He said something like, “Oh man, I dunno. That’s gonna be difficult and a longshot and yadda yadda yadda.” Ok, I may have misquoted him a little bit there. The truth is, if he reads this, he’s such a good guy that he’ll probably feel bad. He didn’t mean to discourage me I’m sure. He shouldn’t feel bad, but not because of his intentions. He shouldn’t feel bad because I didn’t listen to him anyway. That was the first of many moments to come in which I’d have to put my head down, and just push through.
My brother-in-law, Murray also works in the industry, funny enough. He’s a Narrative Director on a prominent, yearly, first-person-shooter. Before that, he worked on Bioshock Infinite at Irrational up in Boston. I remember one Christmas during the development of Infinite, we were catching up a bit a I asked him how work was going. I was careful not to be too nosey, but I found it funny (and honestly kind of badass) that he couldn’t really tell me much. I think I was speculating that the game he was working on was indeed a Bioshock title, but he could neither confirm nor deny. I realized later that the secrecy of the industry was one of the things that eventually drew me to it. After all, it’s fun to know things that only a select few others know.
It wasn’t long after seeing the Facebook post that I sent Murray a text telling him what was going on and asking him if he’d go over my resume for me later that night. He’s a great dude and has always been super supportive, but I have to assume he had his doubts. I mean, I know I did. He agreed to look it over for me, so I headed home after work and started updating it. After a few hours of work, I emailed the first draft to Murray and went to bed for the night.
The next morning I got up and had an email waiting. I opened the email and to my surprise, it was pretty long. Like, surprisingly long for a guy that had two very small daughters and was pretty busy to say the least. He had notes. Like, lots of notes. Lots. There were a few typical things in there — a spelling error or two, maybe a formatting error — you know, the usual stuff. The bigger takeaway and reason for the length of the email was some pretty great advice that is the number reason that things worked out: stand out. The gist of it was nothing new to me. This was a longshot for me. I had no experience. I had never worked in video games and now I was trying to go after a position that would have some very qualified candidates for me to compete with. A vanilla Word doc wasn’t going to cut it. It would cross the hiring manager’s desk (if I was extremely lucky) and then immediately go into the trash. I had to make it so that there was no doubt they would at least look at it.
It was then that I had the idea to create a loot chest based on the those found in the Borderlands games, and put my resume inside of it. The resume WAS the loot. As for the resume, I headed into Photoshop and started at square one. I’ve gotta say, you haven’t conducted a job search until you’ve created a resume that has blood splatter on it. This resume had it all — gradients, drop shadows, even a “custom” (read incorrect) Borderlands font that I created with the help of a handy YouTube video. I promise, my design skills have improved at least a bit since then. I made a trip to the craft store and stocked up on supplies. I bought paints, brushes, and of course the wooden box.
Over the next couple weeks, I busted my ass and by the time I was done, the box was looking pretty good. I booted up Borderlands 2 and took some pictures with my phone that I could print out and glue to the inside of the box. I even came up with a concept: my “co-op buddy” Claptrap thought that Gearbox and I would get along, so he wanted to introduce us.
Without knowing it, I was even beginning to learn some very important game design principles: feature creeping and then learning to resist the feature creeps. One example of this was when I had the idea to wire in an orange light that would immediately let them know that I was “legendary” when they opened the box. In case you’re not familiar with Borderlands, it’s a looter shooter in which the item drops are color-coded based on rarity, similar other games like Diablo and Destiny. Legendary is orange, and well, legendary. It’s an item that’s unique and valuable. Luckily, I quickly realized that shipping a box of wires to Gearbox could easily get awkward and cause me to make an unintended negative impression. Needless to say, that feature got cut pretty quickly. With the box and resume finished, I put together a couple extra pieces I made in Photoshop just to show that I was creative and could be counted on for the odd idea here and there, even if they were a little silly. I got everything packed up and shipped it off to Texas. Nice knowing ya, buddy.
During my many conversations with Murray, one of the things he said that stuck with me was that if I could create something that members of the team might notice and start talking about amongst themselves, that would be a very good thing and help me along as I navigated my “longshot” status. I waited about a week before calling the Gearbox offices to check in and make sure the box arrived in one piece. The receptionist answered the phone. I told her who I was, why I was calling, and assured her that didn’t want to bug anyone, I just wanted to make sure that the loot chest resume I’d sent in had arrived ok. Her response was, “Oh, that was YOU? That was pretty cool!” Mission accomplished. If the receptionist was stoked about it, I reasoned, that had to be a good sign. She assured me that she’d have the HR Director call me back. I thanked her and hung up the phone.
The next day, I was at work at the warehouse when my phone rang. Since the warehouse was performing a vital function necessary to the very survival of civilization as we know it, cellphone use was of course prohibited. That said, if these jokers thought I was going to see a number from Plano, TX call me and not pick it up, they had another thing coming. I snuck out the back door and answered the phone.
The HR Director was on the other end of the line. She was excited to talk to me and apologized that she didn’t have my resume in front of her. Apparently some of the team had thought it was a toy, stolen it off of her desk, and never brought it back. Imagine that. We chatted for a few minutes and after she’d confirmed that hadn’t somehow chosen Gearbox’s community manager position as my own personal get rich quick scheme, she asked if I’d be interested in doing a call with the Marketing team. I told her that would be great and we scheduled the call for a couple days later.
At this point, I’m just kind of laughing to myself that managed to con the HR Director into giving me a call. There’s no way I make it past the Marketing team call. Well, I made it past the Marketing team call. Much to my surprise, the call went great and they assured me that I’d be hearing more soon. A few days later, the HR Director reached out to see if I’d be interested in flying to Dallas for an in-person interview. Are you kidding me right now? The way I saw it, I was going to get to go visit my favorite game studio on their dime, and if it all went to hell from here, that was totally ok.
I went to Dallas for the interview, and while it went great, I didn’t end up getting the job. Admittedly, I was pretty crushed. For all my talk about it being a longshot, for all my lack of experience, there was still a part of me that believed in my hustle enough to truly believe I had a shot. In the end, they decided to go with someone more experienced, and understandably so, but they liked me. They liked me so much that they offered me a contract position helping with the forum community (of which I was a regular member). I signed my first contract in May of 2014 and never looked back. I’ll plan a future post about what it was like being a contractor. There’s some good info there that I think might be beneficial to some people. Contracting is a great way to break into the industry that sometimes gets overlooked.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this post, it’s to stand out. Stand out in everything you do and good things will happen. Don’t listen to the people who tell you you can’t. Don’t listen to yourself when you’re worried about a lack of experience, or any other factor that YOU may view as a disadvantage. Disadvantages are subjective. You can either send in a vanilla, boring resume, or you can use that contact point as an opportunity to make an impression. It can sometimes be too late to make a first impression, but it’s never too early. Making a splash at the first contact point could ensure a second, then a third, then an interview, then a job. You never know. Have the courage to reach for ridiculous goals, because you may just pull it off.
I’d love to know what you think of my Borderlands loot chest resume, so make sure to follow me on Twitter (I’m @jauxking over there) and let me know!
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