Reading the comments this video generated the term "diversity hires" stuck out. And then I saw in one of those Youtube comments a quote from a Blizzards game director (working on WoW) explaining how they select new employees these days:
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Last week, I had a chance to talk with World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas. I asked him about what's been happening inside Blizzard.
venturebeat.com
GamesBeat: You mentioned making the team more diverse. Can you talk more about that effort?
Hazzikostas: This is something that has been a goal of ours for years. We have a number of women leaders, people of color across the team. These are areas where we continue to look for a team that represents the players we want to play our game. Part of why diversity is so important is that I, and we as a team, firmly believe that it makes a better game, makes a better product. We’re trying to make a game that’s not for a niche audience. We’re making a game that’s played by millions of people around the world, of all genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, backgrounds in general. To better understand and have a connection with that range of perspectives, we want a team with that same range of perspectives.
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.
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It's clear they completely failed here. They
were hiring incompetent people who ticked diversity boxes and they were disregarding better qualified people based on their sex and ethnicity. How else to explain a video showing two female D4 level designers (one of whom is a married lesbian) who have no idea how to play the game. What a fucking company.