Most hiring processes today would have rejected one of the best writers in gaming in under ten seconds.
Wrong industry. No prior credits, no neat career arc.
Close tab. Move on.
But that same person, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, went on to write the 800-page script for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of 2025’s highest-rated games. She came from private equity: mergers and acquisitions in New York, then a pension fund in Hong Kong. Her way into the project was a Reddit post asking for people to record voice auditions for free.
On paper, she was exactly the kind of CV most companies are built to ignore.
The studio behind Expedition 33 didn’t ignore her. They built an entire team of people like her.
A Game of the Year, Built by “The Wrong People”
Sandfall Interactive is a tiny French studio. Its director, Guillaume Broche, left Ubisoft, posted on Reddit, browsed SoundCloud, and dug through art forums. He ran more than 200 interviews looking for one thing: talent and hunger, not years of experience.
The composer, Lorien Testard, was a guitar teacher who uploaded a new track to SoundCloud every week. He became the composer of a 154-song, eight-hour soundtrack that has since passed a million and a half streams. The art director was an illustrator Broche found on ArtStation. The lead writer was Jennifer.
Around 90% of the team were juniors. For most of them, this was their first game. The whole studio was roughly thirty people, only three of whom came from Ubisoft.
The result: a breakout hit, a Game of the Year contender, a million copies sold in three days.
There’s a hiring philosophy hiding in that:
Find people already doing the work out of love, then give them a stage.
I Know This Pattern, Because I’m One of Them
It’s tempting to file this under nice indie game story, doesn’t apply to me.
But I’ve lived the other side of it.
I quit a corporate job and joined a startup as its first employee. I was hired to design and write content for a 16-week program to manage Type-2 Diabetes. That was the whole brief. I had no formal background in healthcare or product management, but I had a huge interest in technology and a lot of curiosity.
That curiosity kept pulling me past my job description. Why was the app built this way? What would actually help someone twelve weeks into changing their life? I started picking up more of the product, then more, until I was designing the app and owning the entire product experience. Eventually, I was made a co-founder.
Nobody hired me for that. They hired me for my background in training and content creation. What I brought that wasn’t on the CV was the part that mattered.
I’ve since done the same for others. We once had a senior designer working with us on a consulting basis. He was genuinely good, but he couldn’t give us enough time, and our velocity was suffering for it. So we went looking, and we found someone fresh out of college, hunting for his first job.
What struck me in the room wasn’t his portfolio. It was how much he cared about good design, the way he talked about the user experience like it was a personal responsibility. We hired him. He became instrumental in building IRIS, the in-house software we run our rehab and recovery hospitals on.
None of us would have stood out in a traditional filter. Short CVs, no big brands. The shared signal was never the résumé; it was how much each of us cared about the output.
Where Traditional Hiring Goes Blind
Most standard processes are designed to avoid regret, not to discover outliers.
We over-index on brand names, years spent in a narrow box, familiar tool stacks, and portfolios that look like everyone else’s. We under-index on evidence of self-driven learning, work done in the evenings and across domains, and plain curiosity about the problem.
The data backs this up. McKinsey’s research found that hiring for skills is more than twice as effective at predicting performance as hiring for work experience. The proxy we trust most is one of the weakest signals we have.
The hidden cost is simple. You get reliability, but you quietly give up possibility.
There’s a fashionable fix for this: stop hiring for “culture fit,” start hiring for “culture add.” It’s a real improvement. But it mostly widens the net on background. The signal I’ve come to trust is harder to fake and harder to filter for: evidence of obsession, of pride in one’s work.
Someone already doing the work, unprompted, before they ever knew you existed.
Real passion isn’t loud. It’s energy that keeps showing up over time.
But Fire Burns
There’s another part to the story that most “hire for passion” posts miss.
A team of mostly juniors shipping something that looks like a hundred-million-dollar production did not do it on a comfortable nine-to-five. Passion at that intensity has a cost, and pretending otherwise is how good stories quietly become cautionary ones.
The research is uncomfortable. Across eight studies of more than 2,400 people, researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to ask passionate employees to work unpaid, give up their weekends, and take on tasks well outside their role. And they don’t recommend paying them any more for it. Passion is the one trait an organisation can lean on hard while calling it a compliment.
And it burns the person carrying it. The same intensity that makes someone great is what wears them down.
So hiring for fire without any structure is a good instinct that quietly turns into a liability.
Build a Fireplace, Not a Bonfire
The answer isn’t to stop making these bets, but to contain them. A fire in a fireplace warms the house; the same fire on the living-room floor burns it down.
A few things that have helped me:
Source where passion lives, not just where CVs live. Niche communities, forums, GitHub, blogs. Look where people are already doing the work you need, the way we found our designer, the way Broche found his team.
Ask for proof, not adjectives. Everyone says they’re passionate; the word is useless in an interview. “Show me something you built or wrote that nobody asked you to.” “What’s a detail in your work almost no one notices, but you’re proud of?”
Make deliberate bets, without betting the house. You don’t need to copy Sandfall and put 90% juniors on critical systems; in sectors like healthcare that would be reckless. Carve out real slots for these hires, pair each one with a strong senior anchor, and design your process so they don’t get filtered out before you meet them.
Build the fireplace. Guardrails, not just a stage: clear goals, regular reviews, mentorship, and the harder ones: fair pay for the scope they grow into, and a genuine stop on the hours. When someone made me a co-founder, that was the fireplace working: passion met structure and reward, not just more work.
The Question I Keep Coming Back To
If a Jennifer (or a young designer with a rough portfolio and an obvious obsession) applied to your team tomorrow, would your process recognise them, or reject them in ten seconds?
I’m not arguing you should hire for passion instead of fit. I’m arguing that passion, plus the values that actually matter to your team, is the fit worth hiring for, far more than the brand on a CV.
Don’t just light the fire. Build a fireplace.
Minimum Viable Thinking is a newsletter for product people searching for clarity in a culture of clutter. If that’s you, subscribe — one essay at a time.
I write about building products without the clutter, and about using AI in the actual work, not just having opinions about it. Most of it comes from more than a decade in product, much of it in health-tech in India.
Subscribe on Substack