Man With a (Talent) Plan

Ten weeks after Electronic Arts Inc., the world's largest video games company, released The Sims, a popular title in which players create, manage, and nurture (or destroy) a cyber-family, 1 million copies had been sold -- at a price of $49.95 each. The owners of those million copies scrambled to enrich the lives of a family of Sims through personal growth and social interaction. To assist gamers with their skills, EA partnered with a publisher to release an "official strategy guide" titled The Sims: Livin' Large (Prima Publishing, 2000). Half self-help tome, half management tract, the 200-page book offers ideas, hints, and tips on how to succeed in all dimensions of Sim life: conversations, friendships, careers. But the guide emphasized one point: If you want to get ahead, you've got to learn how to work with others. "Good relationships are important to a Sim's ongoing struggle to get ahead," notes the guide. "Friendship is a key state in The Sims. Job advancement is impossible without building a network of ... friends."

It's a principle that governs much more than the simulated world of The Sims. In fact, it is the bedrock of EA's strategy for winning the real-world war for talent. The company's leaders understand that the prosperity of Electronic Arts is dependent on its ability to cultivate a community of talent -- great people who might or might not want a job but who enjoy staying connected to the work of EA. "Creative talent is the scarcest resource on the planet," says Rusty Rueff, 38, senior vice president of HR. "The primary limiting factor on our business is having enough creative leaders on our team. The challenge then becomes how to come into contact with the best of the best and how to establish relationships with them. If we can do that, then somewhere down the road -- I might not know exactly when or where -- they will work with us. If you build and nurture those relationships, you just know that it's going to happen."

It's a back-to-the-future kind of philosophy. These days, most of the action in high-tech hiring involves applying the power of the Internet to accelerate job searches, warehouse job postings, and otherwise automate what may be the most emotional set of decisions in business: Where's the next place I want to work? Who's the next person we let in the door? Rueff recognizes the impact of the Net as much as the next senior executive. But he believes that the real power is in high touch. "In today's marketplace, people don't want to be treated like a commodity," he argues. "They want to know that someone cares about their dreams."

EA needs plenty of talent. Based in Redwood City, California, it is the third-largest software company in the San Francisco Bay Area after Oracle and PeopleSoft. It employs 3,300 people -- more than 1,800 of them as game developers -- in 13 studios across five countries. Electronic Arts is a fierce competitor. It makes some of the most popular games -- FIFA Soccer, Ultima Online, Need for Speed, Wing Commander -- in a market that is overcrowded and overstimulated. It has held its own on Wall Street, despite the crash of high-tech stocks. Its shares, which were selling at around $30 last spring, after the NASDAQ meltdown, have sold for more than $50 since then -- giving EA a market value of nearly $7 billion.

But EA's toughest competitive battle is for talent. "There's not enough talent to go around," says Rueff, looking out his window onto the Oracle campus. "Oracle needs them. Informix needs them. We need them. We're all trying to capture our fair share."

One major attraction for EA -- what Rueff considers an enormous advantage in attracting engineers and programmers -- is the company's track record with its products. Plenty of young, up-and-coming software engineers love to spend their spare time gaming, which means they're probably hooked on one or more of EA's titles. Who wouldn't prefer to work on Madden NFL Football, rather than on the next release of some obscure supply-chain-management applet? But Rueff also knows that he can't rely solely on marquee value to generate a stream of talent for EA's studios as well as for ea.com -- an online-gaming channel and the exclusive provider of interactive entertainment for AOL and its affiliates. To win the battle for talent, Rueff takes a page from the strategy guide for The Sims: Build strong relationships with a pool of talented people.

"We're operating on the leading edge in terms of creating community through technology," Rueff says. "When people hear from us, I hope they think 'Wow, I thought you forgot about me. And now you're actually contacting me to tell me something has changed and that there's another opportunity?' I know this sounds really simple, but how many companies treat people like that? This stuff just doesn't happen. And, for us, it's the tip of the iceberg."