What does it take to build a high-performing organization that lives its values—not just plasters them on a poster?
Brian Riley, VP of Global Talent Acquisition and HR Shared Services at Riot Games, shares how the gaming company refreshes, embeds, and operationalizes its values across the entire hiring lifecycle. From behavioral interview kits to identifying internal “bar raisers”, this is how elite companies build cultural alignment at scale.
Brian also shares:
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rileybrian/
Connect with us:
💻 All Episodes: TalentAllStars.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziprecruiter/
💼 Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davetravers/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziprecruiter
🎵TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ziprecruiter
Enjoyed this episode? We’d be grateful for a rating or review on your favorite podcast app.
[00:00:00] Brian Riley: I observed the things in leaders that I thought were really great, and I observed the things that I thought were not so great. If I had a manager who had really great EQ. I think one of the things that I saw would sometimes lack was like the analytical mindset. And so I think for me, you've gotta use both inputs to make really good decisions as a manager and a leader.
[00:00:18] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent? Today, I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter, and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. So if you listen to this show, you've met talent leaders from a wide variety of industries, from healthcare and technology to logistics and retail.
Today, though, we have a new one, video games. Riot Games is one of the leading companies in this $150 billion industry. And Brian Riley is the company's VP of Global Talent Acquisition and HR Shared Services. So let's bring 'em in. Brian Riley from Riot Games. Welcome to Talent All Stars.
[00:01:01] Brian Riley: It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:02] Dave Travers: So excited. You're the Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and Shared Services at Riot Games. Many people may know Riot Games more by the famous game they started called League of Legends and some other cool games. But before we go there, I wanna start out earlier in your career, you actually started out in finance.
A heritage you and I share. I also started out in finance. So, tell me how you made it from finance and when you realized HR and talent acquisition might be the place for you.
[00:01:30] Brian Riley: Yeah, I think I share a lot in common with others who are in the talent acquisition space. I don't know that anyone I. Usually starts out with that intention in mind. But my story really was I got my educational degree in finance. I actually had the first role in my career. I worked for a small commercial real estate firm as a portfolio analyst. And not long into that role, the company was just experiencing financial issues. And I found myself at a headhunting firm talking to them about another role in finance.
And by the end of the conversation, we were talking about me recruiting, finance, and accounting folks. And so the relatively early stage of my career that I was at. I was pretty open to that. I was pretty open to anything, to be honest with you. And so I got into the agency space and yeah, spent my first five years in recruiting there and absolutely loved it.
It was kind of the right mix of leveraging my finance and accounting understanding, but in more of a, what felt like a bit more of a dynamic type of a role, so I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
[00:02:24] Dave Travers: Was there a specific moment you remember where you're like, wow, I really like this Lara, I could be really good at this?
[00:02:29] Brian Riley: I think it really was sort of the dynamic about recruiting that allowed me to engage a lot with people and a lot of new and different people. So I've always sort of had a curiosity about just kinda like what we're talking about, right? Like getting to understand people, their backgrounds, like what makes them tick, what motivates them.
And as I started doing the recruiting work, kind of matching that with what organizations were looking for and seeing where commonalities existed between candidates and organizations that I was working with just became fascinating to me. And so that was sort of off I went from there.
[00:02:58] Dave Travers: Awesome. Okay, so off you went, including to Capital One and to Amazon, which both are interestingly places that are legendary, and literally books have been written about how they have their own unique talent acquisition stories.
I actually once in a long story for another day, I actually had a conversation once with the co-founders of Capital One, about how they interviewed. Every person who worked at Capital One until there were many thousands of people in size, which is..
[00:03:28] Brian Riley: I've heard that one as well.
[00:03:28] Dave Travers: Yeah. One of the craziest things I've ever heard, but turned out to be effective for Capital One. But anyways, two places that are different but took a their own unique approaches and changed over time in their approaches to how interviewing works and talent acquisition works. Before we get into Riot Games and what you've done there. What did you learn at those two legendary places about the art and the science of talent acquisition?
Yeah, I think my experience, like even in my agency days, and I had another corporate role before that, I think what I experienced prior to Capital One and Amazon was like relatively unstructured ways of assessing talent. And what I mean by that is different hiring managers had different ways and tricks that they thought were effective at identifying talented individuals.
I think Capital One was my first foray into, I had been exposed to behavior-based interviewing in the past and interviewing based on a company's values, but had never really seen it in practice. So I think when I interviewed at Capital One, it struck me how they were using sort of past examples of things that I had done to be effective to sort of understand like, what might this person do in the future and is the way that this person works aligned to our organizational values, right?
It's not just the what? It's the how. And I think. Where some organizations may miss the mark is really assessing the how people get things done. And that's really important. And so as I look at Capital One, Amazon, and even Riot, they all had a version of that way of assessing talent. And I think candidly, I've been.
I've some brainwashed at this point. Like I really believe that it is one of the most effective ways to understand how people work. And I think doing it consistently also gives you a through line in your process to sort of understand, okay, like we're applying the same bar consistently. And so being able to look at it in that way gives you an opportunity to understand like, Hey, are we achieving success or are we not?
Versus a more unstructured approach, which I think is very, it's very hard to sort of ascertain. What's being asked and what we're assessing in all of those types of interviews. So I think like the values and the values-based behavioral interviewing have been really some of the key influences in my talent acquisition career in the way that I think about assessing talent in the most thorough way possible.
[00:05:43] Dave Travers: Yeah. And so values-based interviewing is something you've brought to Riot now, and so talk a little bit about that approach. If a new person on an interview panel for a first time at Riot Games, if I've interviewed lots of other people in different places, now I'm gonna do it the Riot way. What's the approach? What's different about it?
[00:05:59] Brian Riley: I'll start by saying values-based interviewing existed at Riot before I arrived here. I think we have in the past year we've gone through a refresh of our values. So we had a new CEO appointed a couple of years back, and one of the things as he sort of started to establish his vision for the organization was also, uh, kind of doing a checkup on our values and understanding if like they still applied to where Riot is today. Um, and we did refresh the values somewhat. They're not markedly different from where we were before, but I think the reason why they've been so important is because our values at Riot really represent in a lot of ways our audience, our audience or our players, uh, and.
Our objective as an organization is to make sure that players are at the center of every decision that we make. And so because our values, whether it's serious about games player first dreaming and deliver in it for the long term, they're all geared towards giving, um, uh, players sort of decades of experiences with our products, games, um, you know, and even in the eSports and entertainment community.
And so I think. That is what helps us ensure that the people that we're bringing into the organization are motivated by the same things that we are, because we have a very clear vision around making sure that the player is at the center of what we do, and frankly, we view it as our differentiator. And so I , you know, it's my job and my team's job to make sure that our, we call them interview kits here, but our interview kits are the most accurate depiction of Riot's values that they can be. And then we've installed numerous, like different types of hiring experts and things like that. If you've heard about the bar raiser concept to Amazon, we have something somewhat similar here where there are a number of individuals across the organization who are well-versed in interviewing, well-versed in how to make effective and unbiased hiring decisions and how to. Sort of work with managers and businesses to ensure that we're holding the right bar when we're hiring talent into the organization.
[00:08:00] Dave Travers: Totally. I think if you have a few people in your organization who are really good bar raisers, using the Amazon terminology and taking that craft seriously and bringing them into lots of interviews and teaching other people how to do it is super powerful and intuitive, I think, to a lot of people. And I think the idea conceptually of saying, Hey, as we look at our most gigh performing most important people in the organization. There's a set of values that they tend to have in common, and we should think about how to recruit more people like them or who are at least aligned with them. That's super intuitive. I. I think how to get started. Like if we're not doing that today and you are giving advice to a fellow TA leader that like, that's a path I want to take my organization down.
How do you get started? What do, how do we get that snowball rolling downhill?
[00:08:49] Brian Riley: Yeah. Well, I think there's a couple of things. I've been a part of organizations where the values don't really live or they don't necessarily exist in the organizations. And so I think number one is actually making sure you've got a business who's bought into the values that you're harnessing as an organization to begin with because believe it or not. There are varying degrees of that based on the experiences that I've had. I think then what it comes to, and this is really where the hard work comes in, I've been through this a few times now, is developing a set of tools and we use like question banks here, where effectively you sort of have these questions that are aligned to a specific value, right?
And so. Not only do you have to have questions, but you have to have your interviewers train on what types of information are you looking for? How do you probe, how do you ask follow-up questions, like how do you bottom it out to make sure that you're getting at the clearest version of the answer to one of those questions that you can get.
And then I think the last thing is, especially I. More on the recruiter side and more as it pertains to preparing candidates. There's a, um, I call it the STAR method. A lot of places call it the STAR method. It's a way of answering questions our behavioral-based interview questions are really centered around, like I mentioned earlier, understanding people's experiences and how they sort of reacted in certain situations. And so using those examples, you sort of frame, if you're a candidate, you say, here's the situation. I say, situation, action and result. Some framing say situation, task, action, and result. It's all the same thing, but really thinking about the structure in which you answer the question and sort of having a beginning, middle, and an end, if you will.
What was the problem statement? What did you do, and what happened as a result of what you did? And so that's the other thing, where answering interview questions at a place like Riot or other values-based interviewing organizations that have been a part of before does require a certain structure to ensure that you're giving the clearest answer that you can to any one of those questions that you're being asked.
[00:10:42] Dave Travers: I think that is incredibly powerful. If you have a bunch of people who are bought in to do it. I think it feels intimidating. If you are the new TA leader who's trying to take a bunch of people who have existing habits and existing formula for how they go through an interview and say, yep, we've got some values.
They're on a poster. We all agree they're important values, but now I'm gonna start using the SAR method, or some more structural way of getting at those. If you had to start from scratch, how do you convince an organization to change their approach and behavior, and how they would do that?
[00:11:14] Brian Riley: Honestly, I think what it boils down to for me is culture, and culture can be sort of a loose term, but I think in this case, right? If you have values and if you really believe in values as an organization, then what you're probably trying to do is establish a culture within that organization and a culture being synonymous with a way of working. And so I think. Honestly, if you want to see, there are other ways to do this. I mean, I'm not saying it's exclusively limited to the way that you interview, but I think one of the best ways to bring a culture to life based on a vision in your organization is to ensure that the people you're bringing into the organization are aligned to those values and they believe in the culture you're building and they believe in sort of the way you're working as an organization.
Right. And it's a two-way street. It also gives candidates an opportunity to sort of understand like, hey, is this a good place for me? Or maybe I don't like the way that they work. So I think it's really effective way, ultimately, to build a culture that is consistent with what you want to bring or what your vision for the organization is.
[00:12:12] Dave Travers: Yeah, absolutely. Shared culture and shared definition, and belief in the culture. When you get buy-in on that getting, when you have that shared understanding, the idea that we should bring in new people and keep existing people that. Fit that culture is super powerful and intuitive to folks. Okay, so you've gone in your journey finance, we touched on earlier to talent acquisition and leading talent acquisition to now also expanding beyond that.
So you have this HR shared services role in addition to leading talent acquisition. And so. As you've done that and expanded, shifted which function you're in, and then expanded your scope, and as you've gone from being a now an individual contributor back in your first agency days to then being a leader, to now being a leader of leaders, how does that becoming a leader of leaders for somebody who's young and ambitious and sees you.
Having moved up and say, that's a career path I want to emulate. How do I prepare myself to the skillset and the confidence and the attributes that are gonna help me get there someday? What would you say?
[00:13:15] Brian Riley: The way that I really kind of went about that was I observed, I. The things in leaders that I had that I thought were really great and I observed the things that I thought were not so great. And I also listened to my peers a lot. I was in a lot of conversations and was helping other coworkers or peers navigate like career situations. And I think I ascertained a couple of things. I think a lot of what I was looking for and a lot of what I heard the folks around me looking for. For was like a very high degree of like human centricity or emotional intelligence.
I think meeting someone where they're at and trying to figure out ways to like work with them or work through certain things is super, super important. And I found it was sort of a mixed bag with my managers coming up who were particularly good at that. And then I think the other piece that did usually if I had a manager who had really great uq, I think one of the things that I saw would sometimes lack was like the analytical mindset or the data-driven rigor that you can put around like a process, right? And so what I found was either most of my managers were really good at one, but not the other.
And also in having conversations with my peers, I felt like I heard a lot of the same types of themes emerged. So in my mind it was like, okay, like. Very early. I established this mindset that in order to be an effective manager and in order to be an effective leader, you've gotta be able to do both. And I think that the two can be very much at odds sometimes as well, which I actually think is a good thing 'cause it creates like this healthy tension. So you figure out. Hey, where am I on the scale, right? And do I need to anchor more towards my emotional intelligence in this situation? Sort of the analytical rigor in this situation. Is it good right in the middle? And I think there's usually an element of truth to both.
And so I think for me, what became evident was you've gotta use both inputs to make really good decisions as a manager and a leader. And I think what I've found over time is it has served me really well. 'cause it allows me to oscillate. More to the data and information side for people who that really resonates with.
And for people who resonate more with the EQ side of thing, they can kind of go there too without losing the other in the process.
[00:15:21] Dave Travers: Yeah. I think being able to speak both that, what's so interesting about what you're saying, being able to speak both the emotional intelligence and the analytical, makes you bilingual in some sort of sense from a business standpoint.
And then what you is also powerful. You talked about being able to read the audience. And say, Hey, I'm clearly talking to someone who's leaning in when it comes to analytics and drifting off when I'm talking about emotional intelligence or the opposite. And reading the room is very powerful. And I think what's interesting about that answer is that I think as an individual contributor or a rising manager, when you look up and see somebody you want to emulate, who's a senior leader.
Often, the thing you think about is the outwardly visible forms of senior leadership. It's like running a big meeting or like, wow, that person's so comfortable talking to the CEO and C-level executives, and they're so direct and confident and breezy. It's interesting to hear someone who's in it talking about actually it's emotional intelligence. And the ability to read, like what do I use analytics right now? Or do I use emotional intelligence to break through to this?
[00:16:24] Brian Riley: Yeah. Yeah, it's both. And knowing your audience again, becomes key. 'cause I don't walk into those senior leader meetings without having some idea of. Who I'm gonna be sitting across from and how they like to engage with the topic that we're talking about.
And so, aside from emotional intelligence and data, analytical rigor, it's really doing the prep work too. 'cause it, yeah, that confidence doesn't come unless you feel well prepared to have that conversation. Imagine yourself being somebody who's never done that prep work. Like how do you even think about doing that prep work for the first time? Like how does that even unfold?
I'm a huge fan of, I don't wanna call it investigating, but I really do think you have to be proactive in understanding your audience, right? And so I think sometimes what I've observed in the past are folks who say, I've got this set of information, or I've got this recommendation, and it's gonna be the thing, right?
But don't necessarily bother to understand. What is it that the person on the other side of the table wants to get out of this conversation? What are they trying to learn? And maybe even more importantly, can you communicate best with that person? And so I've always been one to, even if I don't have a close working relationship with that individual, there's usually folks who are around them who can help me understand what makes them tick.
And so with that, I'll usually start to prepare information and materials. I'll usually even try to do like a walkthrough to understand if. What I'm sharing or what I'm talking about, or the way that I'm planning to run a meeting is going to meet their expectations. So what may appear somewhat seamless and easy on the outside actually involves a lot of like hard work and proactive outreach to ensure you're gonna meet the mark and you don't always, even that.
Is not a hundred percent successful, but I'd say that it amplifies the likelihood of success quite a bit. But you have to spend time doing that, digging and educating yourself on the people who are gonna be in the room with you.
[00:18:09] Dave Travers: I love that. Okay, so we always finish off these episodes with a lightning round. And so I want you to think about, you've had a new CEO for a couple years now, not that new. And so you bump into the CEO in the company elevator or making a cup of coffee together. And he or she says, Hey Brian, I was thinking about the talent acquisition function and just how do we measure it? Like over the next year or two, how do we measure whether we're doing great or not? What would you say to that?
[00:18:36] Brian Riley: Yeah. There's a big emphasis at Riot right now on something we call it talent density, right? We've had years of high-volume hiring, right? And I think we've had a lot of really high-quality hires come through that. I think in high-volume periods. We also see at times like areas where it's like, ah, like we could have done this interview better.
And so right now, the emphasis is very much on, let's make sure every hire we make into the organization makes Riot better. And so as a matter of talent density really creating, if you think about just creating dense patches of really talented people within the organization, I think that's the biggest one.
And so my response really, and. We've attempted to quantify this several times. We're still working through the final product is on sort of assessing our quality of hire. What are the key indicators of quality of hire, and what does our work look like relative to that? And that doesn't all lie in the hands of talent acquisition, but talent acquisition certainly plays a big role in bringing those people to the alter. Getting them into the organization and ensuring we've assessed as thoroughly as possible to ensure that they're gonna be successful at Riot. So I'd say like the quality of higher metric in particular, I think would be a very important and meaningful metric for us to share with someone like our CEO right now.
[00:19:42] Dave Travers: Yeah, I don't think there are too many CEOs out there who would say they're not interested in quality. That is a common theme. Okay. I wanted a slightly different scenario. Same thing, lightning round, but think about in this case, like one of the most junior newest people on your team coming to you who's an up and comer and super ambitious and just gets their first opportunity to chat with you in the elevator, grabbing a cup of coffee saying, Hey, what's the skill I need to develop?
Over the next two or three years to be really successful and helpful to the TA team. As I think about how TA is transforming, what can I do as a young person to really stand out and develop a skill that's valuable?
[00:20:21] Brian Riley: I've got two. One is I am given my background. I'm just very much in favor of someone who harnesses analytical ability to understand like, what is the work that I need to do to achieve the outcomes we want to get to? Right? And it varies depending on the space that you're in, but I would. Tell almost anyone, if you understand like sort of proverbial funnel looks like so to speak, right? And you know how much you need to put in the top, you can usually get to a point where it becomes pretty predictable. And so I am a big advocate of recruiters, managers, and leaders alike.
Understanding that, because it really can be fairly predictable if you spend the right time and energy around it. So I think that's one thing I think the other thing, which I can't put my finger on anything specifically right now, but I think there's a lot of TA technology that's evolving, obviously. AI is starting to make its way into everything.
I think for me, although we're not, we don't really have instances of AI running in our talent acquisition organization or really that much at Riot in a big way, so to speak. I think understanding what tools are out there, which ones are effective, and like which ones really give recruiters the type of lift that's meaningful in terms of like how they do their work, optimizes the workflows.
We've looked at things like how to automate scheduling, stuff like that. But I think as an up-and-coming recruiter, like what tools are best at helping you identify talent really does give you a leg up in terms of just understanding not only how to do your job the best. That you can now, but also staying on top of it so that in five years you, you've sort of evolved with the technology versus you can't fax resumes anymore.
Right? And so I think you have to kind of be thinking about, Hey, how do I come up the curve as this technology evolves and understand how to be the best recruiter possible with the technologies that are available to me. So I'd say those two things.
[00:22:05] Dave Travers: That is such great advice, both of them. But I think thinking about as a young person coming up. What's the technology that we might need to be expert in? It's a much higher bar to say Riot or some other companies had a piece of technology for five years that everybody inside the organization's been using. I've been here for five weeks. I'm gonna become more expert on that than everyone else.
That's a high bar, but the technology that no one knows about yet, and I'm the young person willing to learn, that's a really easy bar to clear to become the expert in that. So I love that. Brian, one more question for you, which is one more lightning round, which is now. Not just a CEO, or not a junior person, but a peer, somebody else who's running a talent organization is stepping into a brand new job, running a TA team.
What's the thing you would do to assess what the state of a TA team is today coming in as a new leader? How would you even approach that as I, as a new talent leader come in? In my first day, my first week?
[00:23:01] Brian Riley: I think one thing, and I've learned this the hard way in the past too, you. Absolutely have to listen a lot.
Like I think you can come to an organization and kind of think you understand what type of wholesale change will make them get better without spending enough time in the problem. I joke sometimes to others that like, I'm a glutton for punishment because every role that I've been into has been a really challenging set of circumstances that.
My predecessor had not been able to solve. Right? And so I think understanding and really going deep on the root cause of any problems or issues or identifying gaps or areas that are not working well, is really sort of key. And so the way that like I sort of think about approaching that is. Spend the first three to six months understanding the big picture before you really start to make like what I'd call quote unquote wholesale changes.
So I think that's the first thing, but along the way, if you observe things that could be better, just like easy fixes. So, for instance, two of the first things that I did at Riot was I saw our internal job board, which is where we post jobs for our employees who are also welcome to apply to them. They didn't have ID numbers on them, and one of the first things I suggested was.
Why don't we have ID numbers? Like it's hard to like software engineer one through a hundred. Like it's just an easier way to delineate what's what. And the other thing was they didn't have hiring manager names on them. So these candidates couldn't go to the hiring manager and have an informal conversation.
And so I was like, how hard is that to add? And my team was like. It will take less than a day. Like we'll add it right now. And I was like, great. And all of a sudden, we've like cleared out this queue of all these questions around that stuff because we added those things. So I think if you have those types of minute changes that you can, like knobs, you can turn that make relatively significant impact, do that too, but kind of understand the way things are working from end to end, understand where the real problem areas are, and then start to focus your time and energy to those places, assuming they align to like where it is that you're trying to get to with the TA organization that you're leading.
[00:24:55] Dave Travers: That's great. So the listening. What's interesting about when you listen, you don't have to necessarily come in on day one and solve the gnarliest most difficult problem the organization's facing, sometimes just having listened and clearly just labeling, like being the new person I. You're not here to blame anyone or whatever, but just like, like saying, Hey, we clearly have a big issue we need to figure out here.
And then the other thing you said that's awesome is that you don't have to just stop there. If there's a super-easy fix to show that stuff is gonna happen. Now that I'm in charge, we're gonna make some quick decisions on visible but not very complicated things. All of a sudden, right away, you establish yourself.
Super interesting and powerful advice. Brian Riley, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and HR Shared Services at Riot Games. It's very clear why you're a talent all-star. Thanks so much for being with us today.
[00:25:47] Brian Riley: Hey, thank you all so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[00:25:53] Dave Travers: That's Brian Riley, the VP of Global Talent Acquisition and HR Shared Services at Riot Games. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. And if you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars, and we'll see you next time.