Design

By Jonathan Hunter — Lead of Talent Acquisition, AAA video games. Nearly a decade hiring for major studios. Last updated: [August 2026]

You get hired as a designer by showing your reasoning, not just your output — the WHY behind each decision. Design is a written discipline as much as a creative one, so recruiters read your CV and portfolio as live evidence of how clearly you communicate. With 75to 150 applicants on a typical vacancy, the designers who explain their process step by step are the ones who get the first-stage call.

• Show your thought process — the WHY behind a decision matters as much as the decision itself

• Treat your CV and portfolio as proof of your writing — clear written communication is key; studios want clear design documentation

• Your portfolio needs to explain your reasoning step by step, not just show the finished result

Getting a job in the games industry as a Designer is a slightly different challenge to Art or Engineering. Whether you’re a Level Designer, Systems Designer, Combat Designer, Narrative Designer, Economy Designer, or UX/UI Designer, the thing recruiters are really trying to assess is how you think, not just what you shipped.

Recruiters will assess the clarity of your written communication in both your CV and your portfolio. Writing design documentation is a huge part of the job, so you are going to be rated on it whether or not anyone tells you so.

What recruiters are matching your portfolio against

Every vacancy gets boiled down by the recruiter into three to five key attributes taken from the hiring manager’s brief. Your portfolio is checked against that list. For design roles, they are usually trying to match:

• Design specialism (e.g. Level Design, Systems Design, Combat Design, Narrative Design, Economy Design, UX/UI Design)

• Genre & product match(e.g. a multiplayer online combat game, an open-world RPG, a mobile live-service title)

• Process & reasoning (can you clearly explain WHY you made the decisions you did, not just show the finished result)

When describing your experience

The best thing you can do to get hired is prove you can think, not just execute. What makes a designer hireable is being able to walk a reader through the problem you were solving, the options you considered, the decision you made, and why — ideally backed up with playtest feedback or data on the outcome.

Lay out every case study the same way a good design document is structured: Problem > Process > Decision > Outcome.

And…

Always explicitly outline what the viewer is looking at. Don’t just drop in a level map, a flowchart, or a spreadsheet — annotate it. Explain your choices and point out, very specifically, what your contribution was, what problem it solved, and why you chose that solution over the alternatives you considered.

My three CV rules

These are the same three rules I apply to every CV I review, whatever the discipline.

1. Make it easy to read. A recruiter spends roughly two seconds on the first scan of your CV, deciding whether to keep reading or reject. Use white space, bullet points, and bold text on the keywords that matter, and put the most relevant information at the top. Two pages is standard — the exact length matters far less than whether the page can be scanned quickly.

2. Be explicit. Never rely on the reader to infer anything. Use the formula: task + tool or technique + product or location + result. If it isn’t written down, the recruiter will not guess it, and they will not look it up.

3. Favour facts over descriptions. ‘Improved efficiency’ and ‘good team player’ are opinions, and they carry no weight. Objective, quantifiable facts are irrefutable. Back up statements with numbers wherever you can.

For designers, that means explaining exactly how you contributed to the end product: what you designed, which tools you used to build and document it, and what the measurable outcome was — player-facing (retention, completion rate, session length) or team-facing (faster iteration, a clearer pipeline).

Applying to AAA studios

If you’re applying to AAA studios, specialism matters even more. Large studios silo their departments and hire narrow specialists, not generalists — a studio building a multiplayer combat game wants to see combat and multiplayer examples at the top of your CV, not a solo narrative project from three years ago. Smaller and indie studios do the opposite, and look for versatile generalists.

I recommend creating a few versions of your CV, tailored to specific types of design and genre. You should also tailor your summary per job, signposting the most relevant work evidence you’ve got.

ALWAYS be explicit, telling the reader exactly what you designed and why:

Implied

Designed levels and gameplay systems in Unreal Engine.

Explicit

Level Design: Designed and whiteboxed 5 PvP combat encounters for a AAA multiplayer extraction shooter in Unreal Engine 5, iterating on playtest feedback to increase encounter completion rate by 18%.

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