If you need to fill open positions, consider hiring contractors for your gaming studio. Compared to full-time employees (FTEs), contractors can be a more cost-effective solution that helps you complete projects on time, and successfully.
With a contract position, a worker is hired to complete a specific job in a specific timeframe. Contractors offer flexibility because you don’t have to commit to them full-time or provide full-time benefits like health insurance or retirement matching. If the contractor does great work, you could hire them for another contract later, or look into offering them a full-time role.
When you have an open position, here are five reasons to hire a contractor rather than a full-time employee.
1. Contractors Are More Cost-Effective
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the true cost of hiring a new full-time employee adds up to 1.25 to 1.4 times the salary. That’s because you’ll have to account for payroll tax costs, workers’ compensation and other work insurance coverage, recruitment costs including background checks and drug testing, employee benefits like retirement savings plans, initial and ongoing training, and miscellaneous items.
With a contractor, most of those extra costs are eliminated. You can hire a contractor more quickly and pay less money overall for the same work that’s completed.
Plus, you can do all this while potentially paying the contractor a higher hourly wage. More gaming professionals are increasingly open to contract work, as a 2023 report by Vox found 67% of contractors say they feel more secure as a contractor, up from 32% around a decade ago. You can both gain access to a wider talent pool, as well as cut costs on recruitment, hiring, and training, with contractors.
2. Contractors Add Value to Your Organization
Innovation and great ideas are priceless. With contractors, you infuse your team with new creativity and points of view. They can help inspire your full-time workers to be more productive, contribute business-producing ideas, and increase efficiency.
Innovation can help companies become more profitable. According to a 2022 IBM study, organizations that embrace open innovation have a 59% higher revenue growth rate compared to companies that don’t.
With contractors, you create a continual pipeline of innovation as you bring new minds to work for your studio. That innovation could lead to increased revenue that helps you hire more contractors or create full-time positions for the ones you want to retain.
Another way contractors add value? Happy contractors can become effective recruiters for your studio. You can expand your talent pool even more when the contractors you’ve worked with refer others to work for you.
3. Contractors Help You Maintain Momentum
Meeting deadlines can have a multimillion-dollar impact in the gaming world. As Statista reports, video game revenue alone is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.8% between 2023 to 2027, reaching $502.4 billion by 2027.
Gaming moves fast, and studios need to meet the commitments to their customers and stakeholders to succeed. Contractors can be plugged into the exact tasks and projects you need them to work on so you can complete projects on time.
As talent is the number one priority for video game company executives, according to an October 2022 report by Bain & Company, contractors help you keep pace with or stay ahead of the competition. The current full-time talent supply doesn’t meet the demand of gaming studios, but contractors can help you fill in the gaps in the meantime.
4. Contractors Help Your Studio Stay Agile
In the fast-moving gaming industry, contractors provide studios with the ability to stay lean and grow at a rate that’s sustainable. Hiring too many full-time employees at once could lead to future problems, like having to let go of said employees when profits don’t match company growth. With contractors, you can cut ties when needed and protect your long-term finances, without committing to too many full-time employees at once.
Layoffs can be really detrimental to a gaming studio. According to a 2022 report by “Harvard Business Review”, layoffs can erode motivation and lead to mental health issues like anxiety and depression for workers who are left behind. That can hurt your retention, decrease productivity, lead to more mistakes at work and decrease sentiment for your company.
Contractors help you avoid having to do layoffs. They provide predictability for budgeting, which can help protect your business.
5. Contractors Enable You to Try Before You Buy
In the work world, contractors provide a “try before you buy” option for employees. The wrong culture hire could lead to negative ripple effects throughout an organization, which again impact productivity and success for your existing employees.
There’s less liability with hiring contractors, as they become a plug-and-play solution for whatever projects you’re working on. You can evaluate their performance risk-free, and retain or let go of them based on their results.
Hire Contractors for Your Business with ggLocators
If you’d like to explore hiring contractors for your business, the gaming recruiting firm ggLocators can help. We specialize in hiring gaming contractors and gaming contract-to-hire workers, as well as direct-hire gaming employees. Whatever your hiring needs are, we can help you find the talent you’re looking for.
Contact us for a free consultation on how our gaming recruitment team can help your studio.
