A recruitment firm that finds people to work in the esports industry is preparing to raise £80,000 through a crowdfunding campaign to help the company grow.
Newcastle’s Hitmarker Jobs is a dedicated jobs site that specialises in finding talent to work in the competitive video games industry.
Esports has been growing in popularity in recent years and made national headlines when a 15-year-old British boy won nearly £1m playing Fortnite online.
From its office at Newcastle’s Charlotte Square, Hitmarker finds staff to work in all aspects of the esports industry, including developers, gaming coaches, copywriters, studio producers and even team chefs.
Despite having only six members of staff, the firm is one of the biggest specialist esports recruiters in the world and is looking to raise £80,000 to grow its business and expand into the larger video game market.
Content lead Cam Brierley said: “Currently all we do is esports. We are the biggest company in the market at the moment but we have our eyes on the larger gaming markets.
“We post 1,000 jobs a month. The most common is software roles - building apps, the building of platforms - that’s the bulk of what we do. It’s about 15%.
“The job posts are similar to sports and other traditional industries. We have customer service roles, payroll representatives, and community managers - everything that exists in other industries.”
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The majority of the roles the company advertises are based in the US but the Hitmarker has managed to enter the market through hiring a member of staff in America.
Hitmarker is looking to raise the £80,000 through a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube, which will see the company sell 4% of its equity. The firm had considered venture capital investment but decided to raise funds using crowdfunding to allow it to work with its community.
The initial phase of the crowdfunding will be open at the end of the week but will be restricted to friends, family and work connections. After that a public crowdfunding campaign will launch on Crowdcube at the end of the month.
Crowdcube typically lets members of the public invest in companies for as little as £10.
Explaining how the investment will be used, Mr Brierley said: “With gaming there will be about 100 jobs a day that we will be posting. We will need staff to format them, make sure they look great, and put them on the site. Then we will need a developer and a graphic designer.”
He added: “We became the leader in esports by posting as many as we can and we want to do that with gaming.”