In Silicon Valley’s cutthroat market for hiring engineers, free food and bicycles for new employees is no longer enough to entice applicants. That has forced Christophe Bisciglia, CEO of San Francisco-based data startup WibiData, to get so creative in his process to find new staffers that he hired a game designer to build a company-themed overlay for the popular puzzle game Portal 2.
“Every applicant these days is looking at the company’s culture, and it’s hard to be different when everyone’s giving out free food,” says Bisciglia. “We wanted to find a new way to show the world that we are quirky and fun.” The company already gives out free food, and will buy you a bicycle when you get hired on, but Bisciglia decided to make the application process as fun as working at the company.
Why choose to build Portal levels? “Half of the WibiData team plays the game, and our office loves puzzles – there are two jigsaw puzzles in progress right now,” says Bisciglia. Portal, which was launched in 2007 by gaming company Valve, requires players to solve puzzles to move through a physical gaming space, using real-world physics and wormholes.
Right around the time Bisciglia decided to make his own videogame levels, another Portal project was getting attention on Reddit. Game developer Doug Hoogland built a wedding proposal into a few levels of Portal 2, and once Bisciglia saw his work, he hired him to build WibiData’s Portal game.
Bisciglia flew him out to see the office, take pictures, and get architectural drawings so he could build everything to scale. “It’s borderline creepy how accurate the finished product turned out,” he says. Hoogland wrote the game’s story, which features Bisciglia as a bumbling CEO who repeatedly forgets his PIN for the WibiData jobs website.
Players must gather the digits of the PIN as they complete each level and finish a math problem at the end of the game to get to the job application (the mathematically challenged can avoid the equation by taking an escape hatch). The game has all the physics and puzzle-solving of Portal, but sadly no authentic GLaDOS, the game’s AI antagonist. Instead, there’s an equally ambivalent female computer voice that directs you through the game. If you’re planning to download the mod, expect progressively harder levels and around eight hours of game play.
In the week since WibiData published the levels, they’ve been a huge a hit both for getting quality job candidates and getting people to notice the startup. “Compare this to cost of using a recruiter to place a single candidate, this by far the best investment I’ve made in marketing and recruiting,” says Bisciglia. Thus far there’s been 30,000 visits to WibiData’s jobs page (which introduces the project),1,000 downloads of the game modification, and 30 job applications.
To download the levels, you’ll need a copy of Portal 2 for PC or Mac and an account on the Steam game distribution platform. If you make it through the levels, you’ll get the chance to apply for a job and join a team of fellow Portal fans. And if you have a friend who’s more adept at Portal (and looking for a job), the both of you can play a co-op mode on the WibiData levels. If your friend gets hired, the startup will pay you $1,000, or enough for 100 weighted companion cube plushies or Aperture bet365体育赛事 mugs with change to spare.
