MAX:  Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.  I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I'm delighted to welcome you to the show Robin Linn, who is the senior director for creative recruiting.  What is creative recruiting, you're going to find out, for a company called Activision Blizzard, one of the leaders of the leading publishers of games, and Robin, welcome to the show.

ROBIN: Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

MAX: Pleasure.  I was raised on video games and cartoons, and as an adult, I would love to find out what you guys are up to, in the adult world, because I am a big consumer of the output, and you are the factory, you are the input.  So, well, first of all, I need to ask you, Robin, for the audience, maybe not all of them know what Activision Blizzard does.  Could you tell us a few words about what your company does, to get an idea of the size and the kind of people you hire?

ROBIN: We're about a 9000 seat company right so it's a fairly large video game company we've been around for many years, our game titles that might be most widely known are World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty, Overwatch.  And we're also associated with King, so if you've played Candy Crush or Crash Bandicoot, those are also titles that we produce. 

MAX: Wow, if you add those up, I think it's like half of mankind has played one of your things.

ROBIN: We think so, right.

MAX: Especially the candy crush one.  I remember that it was like half the planet on that thing.  It was like a drug.

ROBIN: Right casual gaming, right, that is just, it's addictive. 

MAX: Oh! I'm trying to shake away my old addiction, thinking about it, and what an unusual world to be in.  We've all left the cartoons behind us, and the games behind us, many of us have, unfortunately.  But you managed to stay involved and we want to know the secret.  How did you end up in this industry?  Could you walk us back?

ROBIN: Sure, we'll start back with where I grew up in Orange County, California, which was right next door to Disneyland.  Right next door the ashes from the fireworks would fall upon our roof every summer night.  And I think you grow up next to a place that's based on animation and based on escapism, it can't help infect you a little bit, and I fell in love with animation, early on, because it's the most liberating medium out there.  Anything can be turned into an animated character.  There's been a brave little toaster that took a vacuum cleaner and a toaster and an electric blanket and sent them on a journey.  And any number of anthropomorphic-sized animals and other characters have populated animation since its earliest days, and that freedom intrigued me. I was raised in a very traditional home so the fact that characters were rebellious, and they were rewarded for being rebellious.  You think about the early Mickey Mouse cartoons.  He's not the polite little corporate spokesman that he is now he was, you know, he was quite a little rough and tumble character.  And I think that appealed to me early on, and then I was exposed through Saturday morning movies right after the cartoons, you'd have the movies come on that were those that had Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation.  The Sinbad movies, Jason and the Argonauts, where you could see what you knew were animated characters, right.  I knew that those skeletons weren't real but they felt real.  And to see them interact with live-action actors was just so fascinating for me, that I got drawn into it.  I was lucky enough in school to have a teacher who gave me a box of clay and said well you're not very good at drawing, maybe you can sculpt.  And it turns out it could, and I spun that up into a career and I joined Hanna Barbera cartoons in the late 80s as a meerkat sculptor, someone who was sculpting animated characters.  This was pre CG.  This is back before CG was even thought of.  We'd sculpt the statues that the animators could then hold up and see the character from various perspectives to help them draw their drawings.  And I did that for a couple of years and then CG came along, Jurassic Park and Toy Story, and that kind of spun the industry on its head a little bit.  And I left traditional sculpting and went over to a studio called Sony Pictures Imageworks, which was one of the founders of computer-generated imagery, and worked on Anaconda and contact and then Stuart Little.  And while I was there as an artist I had a manager come to me and said, you have a background in management, because I had been a bank manager, million years ago, and he said you're an artist, so we'd like you to be the artist manager.  Okay. And part of being an artist manager was recruiting talent.

MAX: That's the hardest part.

ROBIN: Yeah.  And when I started the group was about 25 people and I left here about 320, and loved every minute of it and went to work for a couple of smaller studios to get experience there, and then gaming came along, and I thought well I'm not done gaming.  And, it's the interactive version of what I love so much in animation, let's give that a try. So I went to Riot for a bit.  I left Riot and went to Netflix because when Netflix comes calling, you've got to see what that circus is about, you've got to go figure out what that is.  And then, this past fall, the boss I had at Riot, he had left there and gone to Activision and he called me up and said we have a position here of recruiting creatives, what do you think? and so I made the jump back.

MAX: Awesome.  So, from that childhood flame, you skip the part where you ended up working in a bank for a couple of years.  I guess that was less memorable.

ROBIN: I graduated high school, unfortunately, economic situations were such that I couldn't go to college.

MAX: You had to take a real job, it happens.

Robin: I had to take a real job and I thought banking is a real job where you wear a tie. I remember I was given a gift of a briefcase, right, because I'm going to carry my, I don't know what I was supposed to carry.  I carried my lunch in it primarily.  Yeah, and that was it.  But yeah I did a number of years in banking and I was pretty good at it.  I was about to be promoted to be an assistant vice president of operations at a small bank.  And at that same time that was coming together, I got that offer to be a sculptor and Hanna Barbera cartoons and I'm sorry.  You know when that lands in your lap, the banking just kind of fades away.  I ran from finance.

MAX: It faded away, but you mentioned in your story that they looked at your resume and said, Well, you've worked at a bank, therefore you can manage people, it's funny how that association works because why would somebody who is coming from a bank, know how to manage creators, it doesn't make much sense.  But I suppose management for some people who are so in love with their craft is considered a chore.  And something that I don't want to deal with is the admi...