• Situation: 83% of Black teens play video games, yet less than 5% of the U.S. esports/gaming workforce identifies as Black.

• Brief: Riot Games asked us to help them find better and more effective ways to attract and hire a more diverse and inclusive workforce at their company.

• Objectives: The primary objectives included making young Black students aware of the many career opportunities available in the gaming industry and at Riot Games in particular. The goals also included Riot Games awarding internships and scholarships.

To get the attention of and participation from young Black students, we created a 2-day live event and festival experience called “The Kickback.” The event was designed to leverage the culture of gaming and esports among diverse HBCU students as a new kind of high-energy and entertaining “career fair” for the gaming industry. The experience included live esports+gaming competitions, sneaker culture+art activations, career-oriented panel discussions and resume writing workshops staffed by gaming industry executives, many of whom were Black. Each day ended with live musical performances by popular hip-hop artists. Most of the activities were filmed and live streamed on Twitch and YouTube.

By tapping into the real culture of gaming, ‘The Kickback’ has created a new channel of recruitment for Riot Games that attracts diverse and passionate candidates. The Riot brand has now found a very unique and powerful platform to amplify their messages of diversity and inclusion.

Audience Insights: Job fairs are boring to most young people, especially gamers. Therefore, the strategy was to create an entertainment-like experience that tapped into the core passions of gamers while also presenting them with career opportunities. We essentially created a career fair disguised as a celebration of all things gaming and esports. 83% of Black teens play video games, yet less than 5% of the U.S. esports/gaming workforce identifies as Black. Students of color that are passionate about gaming rarely, if ever, are exposed to Black people with careers in or knowledge of the gaming industry.

Community building/management approach: Using our pre-existing esports/gaming related relationships and credibility among HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and local high schools, we enlisted the support of the various schools’ administration and communication channels to recruit students to attend our event. This included emails, social media posts, posters, and on campus word of mouth.

The short term impact of The Kickback can be found in new internships, jobs, and scholarships awarded at the event as well as post-event. A long-term pipeline for the HBCU students now exists where once there was none. It was important to reach students in-person through messages delivered by Riot employees and others, as well as the 1.3M people who viewed the livestreams. The music talent also reached out to their social media followers (in aggregate over 11M people). Most importantly, hearing directly from young attendees on how their “lives were changed” by our efforts made it all worthwhile. Behaviors were changed by the new point of view and sense of hope instilled in all who participated with real path to careers in gaming. Riot Games is the first in the industry to support anything like The Kickback and their objectives of creating a new channel of recruitment realized.