Recruitment: How Does Ubisoft Rely on Its Alumni Employees?

More than 40 French Ubisoft employees are graduates of Grenoble Ecole de Management. Every year, these employees much like employees from other major schools are called upon by Ubisoft to help implement a “Campus Management” strategy. The goal is to help organize and lead events that promote Ubisoft’s employer branding. Why and how is Ubisoft building on informal alumni networking?

"The average age at Ubisoft is 33 years old and Ubisoft is only 30 years old. We have 12,000 employees worldwide and approximately 2,000 in France. It's very easy for students to connect with our employee ambassadors," explains Guillaume Saintagne, campus manager at Ubisoft in charge of coordinating brand employer actions for all French Ubisoft locations. "We have growing needs, in particular for fields such as finance, marketing, communications and HR. As result, it's interesting for us to develop our visibility at business schools like Grenoble Ecole de Management."

In addition to hiring for administrative and support jobs, Ubisoft must also target and attract programmers to help develop its online games. These same programmers can be targeted by GAFA. As a result, Ubisoft Campus Managers are also present on engineering school campuses in order to boost the company's visibility and attract potential recruit. The goal is always to increase visibility and encourage job applications.

Alumni ambassadors

"Recruiters aren't always the best option to interact with students on campus. We've based our strategy on creating conversation and connections during recruitment forums. To do so, we rely on our alumni who interact with students. Recruiters can then follow up to help students sort through various career options within the company."

Why does Ubisoft rely on its alumni to connect with students? Guillaume explains: "What an alumni shares with students is often perceived as being more authentic. Alumni take part in the company's day to day activities. HR managers and recruiters have more of a theoretical perspective. As a result, alumni provide concrete meaning to what it means to work in the company. We've started implementing more and more actions to interact with students early on in their studies as we've found it pays to convince students early on."

In addition to traditional job forums, Ubisoft also organizes events such as after work get togethers with alumni, breakfast meetings and video chats. The company is planning to create internal alumni communities to encourage networking between alumni and the company.

More to come in 2017/2018

In the following school year, more actions will be implemented to promote exchanges between students, interns and alumni employees. "The idea is to remove barriers and hierarchy in order to free up interaction," adds Guillaume. Since January 2017, Ubisoft implemented its "Make your Mark" campaign on its recruitment stands. By using an iPad with the "InMind" application, recruiters and alumni who interacted with students were able to take pictures of their résumés and share them instantaneously with all Ubisoft recruiters in France. At GEM, the action was combined with a conference on the state of the video game market and attracted 113 students.