Recruitment lessons from Joe Brumm, creator of Bluey
Photo credit: Adele Last
Children’s animated series, Bluey, has won over fans and critics globally, with a swag of awards to its credit.
Bluey’s creator, Joe Brumm, was the final presenter at SHAPE 2024 yesterday afternoon (pictured above). He had the audience’s full attention as he shared how the germination of an idea for Bluey flowered into the show that delights kids and adults equally and has won a swag of local and international awards.
After the 2017 pilot episode of Bluey secured Brumm $6 million to produce 52 seven-minute episodes for the ABC and BBC he faced his most important task – recruiting a team of animators.
Brumm spoke briefly about the production process for an episode of Bluey, in which each animator’s work is an average of 10 seconds of screen time per episode.
A more comprehensive version of the production process appears on The Bluey Wikipedia page:
“Approximately fifteen episodes of the series are developed by the studio at any one time across a range of production stages. After story ideas are conceived, the script-writing process takes place for up to two months. The episodes are then storyboarded by artists, who produce 500 to 800 drawings over three weeks while consulting the writer’s script. After the storyboard is finished, a black and white animatic is produced, to which the dialogue recorded independently by voice artists is added. The episodes are then worked on by animators, background artists, designers, and layout teams for four weeks. The entire production team views a near-completed episode of Bluey on a Friday…the(se) viewings developed into test screenings where members of production would bring their family, friends and children to watch the episode. The complete production process for an episode takes three to four months.”
As Bluey is produced entirely at a Brisbane production studio, Brumm’s first recruitment challenge was hiring enough good 2D animators from the local market on a tight budget.
Faced with the reality of recruiting many inexperienced art school graduates Brumm knew the overall quality of each student’s animated films (effectively show reels for the animator’s talent) would be low making it tough from him to distinguish the talent he needed for his 52-episode season.
Brumm looked for a glimpse of what he called “something special” amongst the general mediocrity of these students’ films.
Brumm shared one specific hiring story: one student’s film included a scene of a character walking toward the camera, which Brumm said is one of the most demanding and time-consuming things for an animator to do.
Brumm hired the student primarily on the basis of that few seconds of film as he knew the student not only possessed the necessary artistic talent but also the persistence to complete difficult and demanding work.
The total team nature required for Bluey’s production combined with tight deadlines meant talented but temperamental or undisciplined employees would be both disruptive and costly.
Joe Brumm demonstrated what’s critical in hiring, especially volume hiring of candidates whose existing technical skills are hard to differentiate – a focus on a very small number of key selection criteria, especially the hard-to-train motivation competencies (in his case, persistence and team commitment) that are difficult to assess at interview yet critical for successful job performance.
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