EP1: Welcome to The Hunt: The Origin Story and The Way Forward with Joe King

Game Industry Job Hunt

In the premiere episode of the Game Industry Job Hunt, Joe briefly introduces the show and shares his personal origin story.

Joe got his start in the video games industry in 2014 in an unlikely way when he applied to a Community Manager role at Gearbox Software. After making it through several stages of the interview process, they offered him a community contractor role (great for getting started) and he cut his teeth remotely in that role for a year and a half.
In 2016, Gearbox hired Joe on as a full time Community Manager. During his three years at Gearbox, he helped to ship more than 13 titles including Borderlands 3 and Battleborn, as well as published projects like Fortnite's physical edition, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, and We Happy Few, among others. He also held a variety of roles touching things like social media, customer support, and influencer management.
In 2019, Joe became the Senior Social Media manager for gaming and pop culture retailer GameStop, where he level up the brand's social presence using an engagement-focused strategy and more conversational tone of voice. Later that year, he trained hundreds of GameStop Store Leaders on social media best practices as a speaker at GameStop's annual conference in his hometown of Nashville, TN. During his time at GameStop, Joe traveled to and covered numerous industry events including E3, San Diego Comic Con, TwitchCon, PAX East, and more.
In 2022, Tencent Games recruited Joe to join their team as a Senior Community Manager. At Tencent, Joe focused on strategy, creating effective community and social media strategies for two titles, NBA Infinite, a competitive mobile game, and SYNCED, a sci-fi shooter. Joe helped lead a team to execute strategy and create innovative engagement events and ideas.

In May of 2024, Joe was impacted by layoffs at Tencent and joined the tens of thousands of gaming professionals looking for their next adventure in the industry. As he progressed in his job search, he realized that he wanted to create a way share the things he was learning with others to help them in their searches. And with that, the Game Industry Job Hunt podcast was born.
On Game Industry Job Hunt, Joe will have unscripted conversations with recruiters, career coaches, and top industry voices to help his audience decode the job hunt with actionable information that they can use immediately to set themselves up for success.

Check out http://gameindustryjobhunt.com for more episodes and resources!
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Joe's Headshot credit: Kyle Gaddo