January 21, 2022

MEET NICOLAS ANSELMI : talent acquisition specialist

, , ,

Meet The Team is an offbeat interview with the studio’s talents. Get to know us, discover our backgrounds, our favorite games, our life at Ubisoft and our hidden talents! This time, let’s meet Nicolas Anselmi, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at the studio.  

 

nicolas anselmi

 

Hi Nicolas, so do you play games?   

Yes, I play a lot and I’m what you might call a hardcore gamer. I’ve been gaming since my dad had an old Amstrad computer with an audio cassette player and a keyboard. Games from the 1980’s like Oh Mummy! or Sorcery, which were on those tapes. Growing up, I got my first Nintendo 64 system on which I played a lot of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 

My dad is still a gamer today and plays games that I don’t play, like Far Cry or Uncharted. I like to test all platforms. I play on mobile, PlayStation, Switch… Right now I’m playing Shin Megami Tensei 5. I tested some FPS like Resident Evil: Village but it’s too intense for me. I like to play at my own pace without depending on others, and without my actions contributing to the experience of others.  

  

What is your best encounter in video games?  

Ragnarok-Online-image-2021

Between high school and prep school, I played Ragnarök Online, a visually animated manga-style MMORPG. In that game I met a woman based in Germany who I have never met in real life.  We’ve known each other for 15 years and we’re still in touch today. It’s pretty crazy to have met someone who doesn’t have the same life as me and to befriend her. I think that’s the magic of video games too.   

  

How did you end up in our studio?   

I’d been working outside of video games for 10 years and never imagined I’d get to work in the industry. The idea came to me while talking to some of the people at headquarters. After a short experience in another company, I decided to go into video games and a headhunter had contacted me to offer me a position at Ubisoft.   

I went through interviews until I joined the studio in 2020, at the very beginning of the lockdown. I used to think that video games were just a wonderful world of creation. Then I realized that it was actually a real business.  

Today, I work in the studio’s recruitment team. My role is to find people who want to join our teams to work on our projects. Most of the time, it’s my team and I who send messages on LinkedIn to potential candidates. If you get a message from us, please bear with us! Laughs.  

We’re approaching people because the triple-A market is very small. We need people who are going to know the ways of production, and they don’t think about applying for our jobs. So we contact them directly. The “Post & Pray” technique, which consists of waiting and hoping that a candidate is interested in us, is increasingly obsolete because today, 50% of our recruitments are not applications.   

  

What do you do when you’re not at work? 

Meet The team nicolas anselmi  

I play and go to the movies a lot! I have a very cute cat that I take care of and I do aerial sports. Aerial fabric, hooping and pole dancing. I don’t have as much time today and with the health crisis, it’s more complicated. But I used to be involved 12 hours a week. I spend a lot of time there because it is not a boring or repetitive sport. I like to renew experiences and this is a sport with a really physical activity where you carry your weight at arm’s length. You work the whole body and it involves dance movements. I’ve been doing it for more than 6 years now and with each course I learn something new. I feel like I have a creative and athletic activity: it’s fulfilling and I feel like I’m flying!  

 

Your favorite punch line?  

Candidate is not a job. 

The phrase is not mine but I use it often. It’s easy when you’re recruiting to forget that you want to evaluate the skills of the person in front of you. That is to say, the person’s job, and not the fact that he or she is a good candidate.  

When you go looking for people who don’t apply, you have to offer them a constructive and positive candidate experience. And not impose on them a complex process, without transparency and with too many steps.   

My job is to offer a recruitment process, but the person I’m going to look for may have other things to do and little time to spend on my process. They may not even want to understand or waste their time. In my opinion, you’re not going to create engagement by assuming that candidates are available to you.   

This punch line covers many aspects of my job as a recruiter, and ultimately allows me to confront the reality of the video game market.   

 

 

Credits :
Editor : Jennifer Lufau
Graphic Designer : Stéphanie Guérin

 

More to read

Discover more articles