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OPM's Kim Parker-Adcock: If you survive this industry downsizing, you can survive anything
18.04.2024 - 16:09 / gamesindustry.biz
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Back in January, UK-based recruiter One Player Mission (known for decades as OPM) closed its doors after 26 years.
While this may seem to be one of many closures the industry has suffered in the past year, OPM's service as a jobs agency gave it different insight into the downsizing currently ongoing in the video games business, with founder Kim Parker-Adcock observing that recruitment can be a good indicator as to what will happen to the wider industry.
Like so many companies, OPM had seen a surge in business after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, although Parker-Adcock notes there were changes underway even before them.
"There were new formats and new hardware coming out, game engines were growing, and remote working wasn't much of a thing but it was definitely a conversation, as was four-day weeks," she tells GamesIndustry.biz.
"Then COVID hit. Everyone's at home playing games. Funding available in 2020 went from millions to billions, everyone grabbed that money, studios were popping up, expanding, and taking on 500 people. We had never known anything like it.
"Simultaneously, because they needed more recruiters, my team and all the recruitment agencies were getting headhunted from. The culmination of that was that of my 11-person sales team, only three remained. We had to rebuild the whole business, with new people, and working remotely because of COVID."
"In this business, you're responsible for making big decisions, and closing down is one of the biggest. Much as it was my choice, it wasn't my first choice"
Rebuilding a business at any time is difficult, but the complications added by remote working made it especially tricky, particularly when it came to training up the new recruits from afar.
"You can't see people, you can't hear them, you can't gauge how they really feel about things," Parker-Adcock explains. "You can't mentor them in the moment, and 95% of training is on the job. So I can completely understand why companies want people back in-house, as inconvenient as it is to people who only took a job because it was remote – and I understand a lot of people genuinely cannot move now."
By 2022, Parker-Adcock and her team noticed that the number of job vacancies was decreasing. Initially, she figured this was the market "rightsizing" after a "tidal wave of recruitment" – but the decline didn't stop.
"Clients stopped responding, or were doing it all internally. We were competing not only with other agencies but also internal teams, some of which contained my staff," she adds with a laugh.
At first, Parker-Adcock was not too concerned. She had seen similar downsizing in the wake of the dotcom bubble bursting in the early 2000s,
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