“Recognizing that the game industry has had certain skews – male-dominated is one obvious one, especially in design – we need to work harder to build and find the qualified candidates who are out there. We can’t just open up a position, take the first couple dozen resumes, look through them, and pick someone out of that pile, because we may just get a couple dozen white male resumes. And it’s not that we wouldn’t hire someone who’s qualified for the job. We will. But we’ll be limiting the range of perspectives that come to our team. Again, this is not about any preferential decisions in the hiring process itself. It’s about working harder to understand how our job descriptions, the way we’re sourcing candidates, the way referrals work, and all the rest are filtering out qualified candidates of other backgrounds before they even make it to us. And then once we’re interviewing people, we’re going to pick the best person for the job at the time, but doing that extra work up front, we have found and continue and find, leads to a more diverse team that is more reflective of the country that we’re in and the player base that plays our game globally.”
Not sure how I feel about this. Saying you want the most qualified candidate but that you have to check their ethnicity before accepting someone is not the same thing.
They’re also saying they want to represent not the games playerbase in the workplace but their ideal playerbase. What does that even mean? And why?