How Journey’s game studio attracts and hires the best talent

Sunni Pavlovic is studio manager for Thatgamecompany, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based creator of hit games such as Flower and Journey. In that role, she is in charge of hiring and evaluating job candidates who want to work alongside studio visionary Jenova Chen.

The company has grown slowly in the past few years, and it now has 15 employees. And one reason for that slow growth is that the company is very careful about who it hires. Pavlovic and her team devise tests for programmers and think about not only what a person can do, but how they will fit with the rest of the team. Thatgamecompany can be choosy because it has such a reputation for making unusual, groundbreaking games that developers would love to make.