Meet Christina Drake, Our Head of Global Talent Acquisition

Christina Drake has built her career around connecting people in the creative industries. After working across music, fashion, and games, she now serves as Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Side, helping shape recruitment strategy across our global operations.  

But Christina is far more than a recruitment leader – she is a regular speaker at high-profile industry events, founder of Moms in Gaming, and member of the WIGI Advisory board, being a leading voice for fostering inclusion in all kinds of games industry communities. 

We sat down with Christina to discuss her journey into games, how recruitment differs across different industries and sectors of game development, and why external development is becoming an increasingly strategic part of how studios build and scale teams. 

Tell us about your background and what drew you to a career in video games. 

My career has always lived at the intersection of work, creativity, and the things I genuinely love. Before games, I worked in music and fashion, so I’ve always been drawn to industries where passion, identity, community, and craft all collide. I’ve never been someone who could fully separate the “business” from the people and heart behind it.  

My love of games started much earlier. My mom was actually a huge part of that. She was a single mom who had worked in an arcade and she would take us to play nickel machines like Rampage. The first game we played on our Sega Genesis was Mortal Kombat, so gaming was woven into my childhood in this really fun, tangible, memorable way. It gave me an early appreciation for collaborative entertainment, storytelling, competition, and the way games can bring people together. I just never imagined it could become a career. 

Games bring together so many things I care about and what ultimately drew me in was the people. Game developers are passionate, specialized, deeply invested, and usually a little weird in the best way. I love that. Recruiting in this space gave me a way to support the people behind the worlds players escape into, obsess over, and build communities around. 

How did you land your first job in the games industry, and were there any pivotal moments that shaped your journey along the way?  

Honestly, I landed in games a little bit by accident. I started taking on a few small recruiting contracts in my free time. What began as a side hustle eventually grew and helped me build enough of a reputation to land at one of the most well-known studios in the world as my first full-time role. I realized this industry needed people who could understand nuance, advocate for talent, and translate between creative, technical, and business priorities. 

A pivotal moment for me was realizing that game recruitment is not transactional. You have to understand the craft behind the roles as they all have their own language, expectations, and pressures. If you do not respect the nuance, you cannot earn trust. 

Based on your experience, would you say recruitment in games is much different from recruitment in other industries? 

Recruitment in games is absolutely different from recruitment in other industries. In many industries, a job title tells you most of what you need to know. In games, a title is just the beginning. You have to understand genre, platform, engine experience, credits, team structure, pipelines, portfolios, and how someone’s work actually contributes to shipping a game. 

You recently moved into the role of Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Side – tell us more about that! 

My new role at Side is to serve as a strategic partner across our global recruiting ecosystem. I help take our recruiting teams’ success to the next level by building scalable systems, improving visibility, strengthening talent pipelines, and creating more consistent processes across regions. 

I lead with a “think global, act local” approach, which means maintaining global alignment while still respecting the nuance of each local market, service line, client, and hiring need. Side operates across the world and recruiting cannot be treated as one-size-fits-all. My role is to help create the structure, strategy, and visibility that allow our teams to move faster while still maintaining the care and quality our clients and candidates deserve. 

I am also an ambassador for Side and work to strengthen our employer brand and industry presence. Whether that is through public speaking, community engagement, thought leadership, or candidate experience, I see brand as a critical part of recruiting. Talent attraction does not start when someone applies for a job. It starts with how people experience your company in the market. 

At the heart of it, my role is about protecting and strengthening the recruiting function. I connect the dots between business goals, regional realities, hiring manager needs, candidate experience, employer brand, and long-term workforce planning. The goal goes beyond filling roles. It is my responsibility to build a talent function that is thoughtful, agile, globally connected, locally informed, and deeply aligned to the business.  

What changes have you seen in the games industry over the years, especially in how studios approach external development?  

The biggest shift I’ve seen is that external development has become much more strategic. It used to be viewed more often as overflow support. Now, the more mature approach is, “How do we build the right internal and external ecosystem from the start?” 

Remote work, outsourcing, and global collaboration have changed how teams are built. Studios are more comfortable working across time zones, regions, and distributed teams. They are also more intentional about where they need internal ownership versus where an external partner can bring speed, specialization, or flexibility. 

The market has also become more cautious. After years of layoffs, restructuring, and pressure on budgets, studios are thinking much more carefully about headcount, fixed costs, and how to stay flexible without sacrificing quality. That has made external development more important because studios still need to build ambitious games. They just need smarter models for doing it. 

How does recruitment for a Codev provider differ from recruitment for a traditional game studio?  

Recruiting for a Codev studio is different because you are not only assessing whether someone can do the work. You are assessing whether they can do the work in a client-facing, adaptable, highly collaborative environment. 

At a traditional studio, someone may join one team, one project, one culture, and one pipeline for a longer period of time. In co-development, candidates often need to work with different client expectations, different communication styles, different engines, different tools, and different production realities. 

That does not mean we only look for generalists. Specialization still matters deeply. But the strongest Codev candidates tend to have flexibility, strong communication, humility, documentation habits, and the ability to ramp quickly. They can take feedback without ego, ask smart questions, and stay steady when priorities shift. 

I also look for people who can handle ambiguity. In external development, things evolve rapidly. The people who thrive are the ones who can stay calm, protect quality, and keep the work moving with agility. 

Are you seeing any interesting trends in external development through the lens of recruitment? And how do you think they will shape recruitment in the years ahead? 

I’m seeing more hybrid thinking in terms of Codev and outsourcing vs. in-house work. Studios are not necessarily choosing one model forever. They are asking, “What do we need to own internally, where do we need flexible support, and where can a partner bring specialized expertise?” 

That might mean co-development for engineering or design support, outsourcing for art production, external QA and LQA, audio and localization support, or a combination of all of those things depending on the project. 

I think the future of external development is going to be more embedded, more strategic, and more globally coordinated. It will not just be about cost savings. It will be about scalability, specialization, speed, and resilience. 

For recruitment, that means we have to become more pipeline driven and globally aware. It is not enough to know who is available. We need to know who is available in which region, with which discipline specialty, which engine experience, which genre background, which employment model, and which level of client readiness. 

The recruiters who rely only on inbound applicants are going to struggle. The recruiters and talent teams who build living talent ecosystems are going to be the ones who thrive long-term.

If you had to give your younger self some advice before starting in this industry, what would it be?     

I would tell her she is more capable than she feels. 

As a woman in a historically male-dominated industry, I shrank myself early in my career. I thought I had to make myself smaller, quieter, or more palatable to be taken seriously. But the truth is, the more I leaned into my authenticity and core strengths, the more I was able to achieve. 

I would tell my younger self to learn the craft, ask questions, trust her instincts, and stop mistaking discomfort for proof that she does not belong. 

The things that made me different became the things that made me effective. My background in music and fashion, my love of community, my ability to read people, my storytelling instincts, my operational brain, my curiosity, my edge, all of that became part of my value. 

If I were to give a summary, the advice would be simple: