Three candidates to on-site within a month
Riot Games, Los Angeles
Gaming, Engineering
Senior Software Engineers, game platform
Exclusive search
The problem
Riot needed senior engineers for the platform that runs League of Legends and VALORANT for millions of concurrent players. The team interviews hard and rejects most of what reaches them, so months of inbound applications and agency CVs had produced almost nobody worth flying in. Melica spent the first week with the hiring manager and two of the engineers who would run the technical loop, working out what had failed before: strong CVs from large studios that fell over on distributed systems design at scale. She went after engineers who had run live services with real concurrency, in games and outside them, and screened every one against the system design questions Riot actually asks. Eight profiles went over. Five passed the first technical screen and three reached on-site.
Riot Games, Los Angeles
Gaming, Engineering
Senior Software Engineers, game platform
Exclusive search
The outcome
Within one month, three candidates had passed every remote stage and were booked for on-site interviews, a first for this team.
30d
Within one month, we moved three candidates to on-site. This has never happened before since our hiring bar at Riot Games is so high.
Riot Games
Questions this search answers
How do you get candidates through a very high hiring bar?
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By learning the bar before searching. Melica sat with the engineers who run the technical loop, then screened every candidate against the questions they ask. Nobody went over who had not already answered them well.
Do you only search inside the client's industry?
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No. Two of the three on-site candidates came from outside games, from companies running live services at similar scale.
How long did it take?
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Thirty days. The brief came in on day one and three candidates were on-site by day thirty.