How Roblox brought its recruiting and hiring process to its platform

Roblox is an online gaming platform that allows users to create games and play those created by other users. It seems only natural, then, that the company built a new recruiting and career center not here in the physical world, but on its own platform.

This month, the company launched the Roblox Career Center. It is designed to both reach early-career and nontraditional candidates and showcase the company and its platform in an immersive application rather than a static careers page.

Users can familiarize themselves with the Roblox platform, attend virtual TED talk-style presentations by company execs, meet recruiters, and learn the company’s history and values. Candidates can also practice Roblox’s gamified assessments, which the company launched earlier this year.

“We have a notable cadre of employees in this company who haven’t come from traditional backgrounds, they’ve come from our creator community,” Roblox CTO Dan Sturman told HR Brew ahead of the launch. “They almost never come from what you would typically think of as the elite schools in computer science in the nation. Often they don’t even have college degrees when they join us, yet they contribute so much to this company. They are some of our strongest performers and our best contributors.”

Sturman said execs would be “asleep at the wheel” if the company didn’t expand recruiting strategies that tap into more of this sort of talent and broaden the ways it recruits, especially when it comes to recent college graduates.

Geographical obstacles. One of the biggest problems the new virtual career center addresses is accessibility and reach for college recruiters. Moving early-career recruiting to an online platform allows the company to source and interact with a much larger and disparate swath of candidates. The company can work with schools it wouldn’t typically be able to travel to in the course of a traditional recruiting program, Sturman said.

On the Roblox platform, recruiters can connect with more students and meet candidates from a variety of different backgrounds that they might have missed if they’re only visiting top tier engineering and computer science programs for a career day or job fair.

“The beauty is our team will actually prospectively reach out to tens of thousands of individuals to expand our reach, and hopefully solicit their interests to apply and learn more about us in this tool,” said Ryan Fitzpatrick, Roblox’s senior director of early career talent.

Since launching on Aug. 10, the career center has had more than 180,000 visitors, and it has been favorited within the platform by users more than 24,000 times, according to Roblox spokesperson Roman Skuratovskiy via email.

Immersive tech recruiting. Building the recruiting platform as an immersive experience allows prospective candidates to familiarize themselves with Roblox and “dip their toes” into the platform at a pace that’s comfortable for them, said Fitzpatrick.

“It allows [candidates] to touch and feel the technology and understand what they might be working on,” Sturman added.

The recruiting center itself is gamified. The more a candidate interacts with features inside the space, the more points they earn to deck out their avatar with user-generated Roblox swag like a beanie or jacket.

The NPCs (non-playable characters) inside the recruiting center are modeled after real Roblox employees. There’s also a boba cafe—an employee favorite at the company’s office in the physical world.

The center is a resource for prospective employees to prepare for interviews and assessments and learn more about the company, but it’s also a chance for Roblox to showcase itself and entice employees to hop on board.

“We can actually talk about this work coming to life and the work that our engineers are doing to make this a reality…They can now actually physically see [it] in this immersive experience,” Fitzpatrick said, pointing to the new spatial audio feature inside the career center as an example of emerging tech that Roblox has developed.

Roblox plans to eventually hold interviews inside the platform: Imagine a hiring manager’s avatar interviewing a candidate’s avatar.

“It’s one thing to talk about technical innovation to recruits. It’s another completely different thing to have them experience those innovations firsthand,” Sturman said.