At Kolibri Games we care a lot about our players. Go to our homepage and you’ll see it clearly stated: “A mobile games studio aspiring to be the most player-oriented games company in the world.” On the front lines of our player engagement is our Community Management team.
Players reach out to us across a host of channels. They write reviews in the app stores, engage with us on Reddit, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and send us in-game feedback. We read it all! And we respond with help, high-fives, suggestions, birthday wishes and more. Being responsive to our players is a cornerstone of our success. Player feedback has helped guide our development from the very start and we couldn’t do it without our Community Management team, who present player feedback directly to our games teams. So what does it take to land a role as one of the voices of Kolibri Games?
Our hiring process
We currently hire for two roles: Player Support, and Community Management. Our Player Support agents are primarily responsible for answering reviews and in-game help messages. Player Support communication tends to be one-to-one with individual players and takes place primarily over email. Our Community Managers run our social channels, like our Subreddit and Discord. It’s very public-facing and players will look forward to your posts and comments. Hiring for both roles starts off with a recruiter Zoom call. In this call, we’ll find out a little about you, answer your questions about us and about the role, and generally see if we’re all on the same page. From there we’ll ask you to do a written test in English and, if applicable, another language as required for the specific position. This test – and the tests you’ll do on your trial days – essentially consists of player questions, feedback, bug reports, and complaints. There aren’t necessarily “right” or “wrong” answers on this first test. We’re interested in your writing and your thinking. Player-facing jobs are heavy on “soft skills” and that’s what we’re paying attention to here.
Following the test, we’ll schedule a call with our Head of Community Management and a call with one of our Senior Player Support Agents. In both of these calls we’re looking forward to learning more about you, and helping you learn everything about us – from specific questions you might have about the role, to general questions about our company culture and how much fun our parties are.
From there, it’s two trial days. For all roles at Kolibri Games we do trial days and they are essentially a chance for you to spend two days doing work similar to what you’d do as an employee, and a chance to have lunch with your team and take a few coffee breaks with other Kolibris (these days all over Zoom). In the case of Community and Player Support trial days, you won’t be responding to actual players, but answering a whole range of emails and support requests we created to simulate the various issues, problems, and topics players get in touch with us about. Some of these we’ll expect you to handle on your own, others may require you to reach out to other team members with a question or concern. Don’t be afraid to reach out! Our Community team has its own Slack channel and you’ll be added to it during your trial. While you probably shouldn’t spend your time sending 100 funny GIFs to the team, we do use Slack for a lot of our daily chatter and we’d like to see you in it.
After the trial days, we’ll make a decision and get back to you as soon as possible. It may sound like quite a few steps, but investing a lot of time in hiring has allowed us to build a team that’s shipping and supporting multiple live games with millions of active players. When we make you an offer, you’re one of the 1% of applicants who get this far. You can also be sure that we think you’ll fit right in – and we hope you’ll feel the same.
How many languages do I have to speak?
We’ve already mentioned fluency in English and sometimes a second language, and the importance of “soft skills”. Let’s dig in a little deeper. The US is our largest game market – meaning most of our players are from there – with Germany being our second largest. We want to be able to talk to our players in their native language as much as possible, and English and German cover a majority of players. Additionally, many players worldwide learn English as a second language and are comfortable receiving support in it. Still, Idle Miner Tycoon is localized in 26 languages, so if you can bring another language to our support team, we’d be thrilled.
Simply knowing a second language doesn’t automatically make for good support, however. Every country has cultural norms regarding formality, preferred greetings, and even weekend availability. As a Player Support Agent or Community Manager, we’ll be asking you to take cultural cues into account and respond to our players appropriately and empathetically.
Reading a player’s written cues is also important as we have players of every age and level of technical sophistication. When you’re helping a player find a lost cloud save, you may have to coach them through how to find their Player ID or even check to see if they had cloud save enabled. Think about how hard it is to show some of your family members how to take a screenshot! Now imagine that over email in a second language. It’s here where your soft skills will shine, when you can listen to the player’s issues and clearly offer an explanation at a level that works for them.
Gaming experience – great but not essential
It’s not necessary to be a hardcore gamer to excel in these roles, but being able to understand a player’s frustration is going to help you out a lot. Free-to-play mobile games have a diverse player base and sympathising with their concerns is part of the job. You will be supporting our players as they navigate through their games, sometimes offering gameplay tips, or directing them to certain screens in the game. The better you know our games, the easier this’ll be. Beyond that, our Community team is in regular contact with our QA and game development teams, passing on bug reports and player suggestions respectively. They know our games inside and out. The more you can speak to them on their level the easier for everyone.
As long as you know our games, and are willing to learn more about them, previous game company experience isn’t needed. We have Player Support Agents and Community Managers with a history in English teaching and hospitality. Almost any experience where you’re dealing one-on-one with customers will set you up well for these roles.
A number of Kolibris on the team are with us as working students, meaning they are still in university and working between 20 and 40 hours/week depending on their school commitments. As a working student, you don’t need to be studying game design or computer science to join us, just a willingness to work with a diverse group of players from around the world.
Summing it all up…
If you’re ready to join the world’s most player-oriented games company and help us build the best games for and with our players, see our featured open positions below and head over to our careers page to find out more. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.