Question to all those who applied for the new jobs at GB

With all the excitement since Matthew Rorie advertised three new positions at GB to the community, I imagine many of us assembled and submitted our portfolios. I also imagine many of those portfolios contain game reviews, either in text or video form. I personally submitted a review of Receiver.

So, I thought it would be a fun sort of sociological experiment to poll the community: What games did you guys review? What opinions did you guys feel confident enough about to submit as your best work? If you didn't submit a game review, what game-related work did you submit?

While I won't mention all of the content I uploaded, I provided my interview feature with Dave Lang. It was one of my favorite pieces I did last year. I understood his perspective in game development and respected his efforts.

I submitted videos I made for a guy who was opening his own retro videogame store in my hometown. He needed them to reach out to his reddit followers and the general kickstarting audience, because he was asking people to fund his first few months of rent in a brick and mortar strip mall. The videos went on Youtube and were used in his successful IndieGoGo campaign. I also helped run his livestreams for a month or so before getting a job in California (a job which vaporized after two months).

No real reviews or quicklooks, just production stuff. Artsy shit. :X

I play mostly MMOs. It's notoriously difficult to review those until they've been out for a while (people who review them after a few days are crazy).

I actually only ended up submitting a single review. The rest of the stuff in my portfolio was either multimedia (podcast and video clips) and news feature oriented writing. A good chunk of my writing samples didn't even deal with video games at all. They were just some in-depth news feature pieces about some topics I really enjoyed researching and reporting on.

My thought process was that the CBSi HR department is going to look more at the qualifications in terms of writing samples, education, work history and so on while the Giant Bomb crew will gauge passion, fit and general gaming knowledge during the interview process. I felt like the pieces I submitted were more conducive to getting me through the HR department and potentially landing my portfolio on Jeff's desk.

Huh--I figured game reviews would be the number one item on everyone's portfolio. When I posted this topic, I had the idea that I would put all the games into some sort of graph--although, now, it already seems that the categories are much more diverse.

I grabbed a knife and a piece of paper that said "HIRE ME" and stabbed it into Jeff Gerstmann's desk. As it turns out, most office buildings in San Francisco are lightly guarded, especially if you mail yourself into the building inside a big ass box.

For those wanting to be the next greatest game journalist... guy:

Show them your best writing chops, video-game-related or otherwise. Hell, forget the video game stuff!

Prove you can sit in front of a camera and/or microphone and be comfortable.

Get a college degree.

The more work history you have, the better.

If you're just a dude who loves video games a whole bunch, then maybe this isn't the job for you.

I feel so bad for the people who need to wade through those resumes.

@thephantomnaut: That's a great read duder!

I don't, they're paid well and have funny twitter accounts. Here's one my favorite game industry HR people, JOBCAT: https://twitter.com/mistressmousey

I mean, looking at poorly-written/formatted resumes sucks, but HR people are pretty much used to that as far as I can tell. It's the weird applicants that interview well in the first round but turn out to be crazy that are the real curveballs. :3

I'm willing to apply for a janitorial position.

Duties Include: Unclogging toilets with cake in them.

I sent a basket of mini muffins, everyone loves mini muffins.

Well not really, but I thought about it.

I guess so, it just seems in this case in particular the sheer volume and maybe level of suitability of applications has to be right up there.

I'm more interested in hearing what people put in for 'Expected Salary'

@salarn: if it's anything like my current job they should put: 0.10$ per each email received and sent.

I get lots of email at work

Well, here's a link to everything I sent to them. It consists of one podcast, one blog post, one favorite games played in 2013 list, and two reviews.

I think the submissions I have sent represent a wide variety of good writings, but I think that a lack of regularity might hurt me. I've posted blogs whenever I felt like, not on a dedicated and predictable basis. But I have been on a weekly podcast for a year and a few months! Mostly! Sometimes... college got in the way a lot.

Expected salary: I'll live out of my car everyday if I have to.

...OK, seriously, I won't live out of a car but I really just want enough to live in a relatively safe part of town and not have to pinch pennies. I hardly think that I would get the same salary that the rest of the GB crew does.

I'm finally applying for this damn thing, and choosing the blogs I'd want to send in to represent me was...interesting. Especially since I haven't posted any of these yet. Ultimately, they are:

• My Half-Life 2: Episode Two blog. This oughta be fun.
• Dead Space blog. Less fun, but whatever. I remember it showing some of my depth.
• Saints Row: The Third blog. This one I know demonstrates some of my depth.
• Kingdom Hearts blog. Again, depth, plus something I unabashedly love. Need that personal touch.
• Metal Gear Solid 4 review. Part of this is for something more serious than the rest (just to prove I can write that), and the other part is that it's better than the blog accompanying it.
• Xenosaga blog. That's my bread and butter, dawg. Gotta represent the butter.

this is what we submitted

To the Human Resources department of CBSi

Our names are Rene Beijer and Mathew Harvey and for the price of one you can have two!Rene Beijer here, I am a 25 year old bartender living in good ol’ New Zealand, I am extremely confident in making a dick of myself, cameras be damned and can carry a decent conversation on video games, video game developers and the societal changes and impacts that video games and media have on popular culture, my favourite colour is purple and my favourite drink is the Espresso martini, apart from a single shot of espresso and 30 ml’s of a fine vodka I add 7.5 ml’s of Cointreau and Baileys with a dash of Crème de cacao, Kahlua and Frangelico for a decent chocolate hazelnut coffee hit with a nice orange finish,

I have followed the crew of Giant Bomb for the last 14 years, with their humour and zest for the “dumb” playing a significant role in my outlook on life, if I could distil the effect that the crew have had on me to a single word I’d wager it to be empowerment.

This is hella dumb and it probably shouldn’t see the light of day.

Matt here, I also suffer the disability of living in New Zealand. I’m a budding journalist, in my mind anyway. In reality I’m a recent Anthropology and Philosophy graduate who has a volunteer role writing stuff about motorsport. But I’m also a big video game nerd, I probably didn’t need to tell you that since I found my way to your site but I may as well remind you. Not only do I love games but I love the content people produce to celebrate them, everything from the humour of stuff like Rooster Teeth to the informative criticism of people like Errant Signal (and your excellent mix of both). Unfortunately I haven’t produced much videogame related stuff other than this, partly because I spend a lot of time consuming video games media rather than attempting to produce it, and I want that to change. I’m the words guy of us too by the way, partly because I spent three years writing essays at university and partly because Rene said so.

This is hella dumb and should probably at least land us volunteer roles of some sort.

#teamwork

And then we sent in our two CV's as one CV, with my CV on the left, and his CV on the right...

Review importance is kind of shrinking on GB, they are way more focused on camera and video work now. I think that is kind of what they are looking for.

I applied for the producer position. In the reel I submitted I added some pieces of the Gone Home review I put together and a bit of my "Best of 2014" feature were I talk a bit about Bioshock Infinite. I also threw in a snippet of a video that hasn't actually gone up yet. It's a Quick Look style video of Hearthstone for the website I'm currently building.

While the GB producer job would be mostly off camera (which is what I prefer), most of the video game related stuff I've made has me on camera since we're a small team and I have to act as both producer and host. I thought that might be a good selling point since a lot of the GB crew pull double duty as well.

Since Giant Bomb isn't IGN or GameSpot or any of the other larger sites they aren't going to review every game. Currently most guys may not write a review more than once every month or two. They usually hit the AAA games and then it seems like they just review things that interest them beyond that.

The major appeal to me (beyond being able to be around and absorb the knowledge and experience of the GB crew) is that freedom to explore things that interest you. Most video game journalism jobs boil down to the standard news job. You get dozens of press releases daily and you need to make X news posts out of those. Again Giant Bomb doesn't ignore news but they also aren't posting some "news" content from a press release every hour either. It seems like you would have the freedom to take a few weeks or even a month to really pursue a story and get as close to the full scope of reporting and research done as possible. Couple that with the connections and access you would have from working for Giant Bomb and it really is a dream job for someone like me who has a plethora of story ideas that I would like to really dig into beyond the surface level.

@video_game_king: The real question is, if you're the "video game king" then would that make you Jeff's new boss?

I for one welcome our new evil overlord!