Hiring process: How the industry is tackling the lack of gaming expertise

People are often hailed as the heart and brain of any betting and gaming operator, making up a vast and complex network of varied departments that all work in sync. For those that have operated for many years in mature European markets, building that network has been a long-term effort.

While the demand and opportunity for growth in online betting and gaming is broadening in the States, operators are finding themselves hard-pressed to meet requirements and quotas for operational talent. The market is extremely young and although some states have experienced thriving land-based casino sectors for many years, the workforce is limited in the specific knowledge required to run a digital and mobile-first business.

Pair that challenge with Covid-19-related visa complications for relocating staff from other markets and the immense competition that is causing industry folk to be enticed across to other gaming companies, and the process is becoming akin to a rather complex game of chess.

“In order to grow and meet the needs of the industry, we need to start creating the talent,” one industry exec announced at a recent online event. For those entering the US from other markets, the post-PASPA gold rush presented an opportunity to relocate experienced industry talent from Europe or Australia in the early days.

Flutter, for example, transferred a handful of betting folk from Australian brand Sportsbet to FanDuel, as it identified some similarities between the markets. Australian bettors are huge NFL fans and the market is similarly divided by regional regulation. PointsBet also took a gamble in appointing its Australian business’ COO, Johnny Aitken, to lead its expansion into North America.

Kindred, 888, and Betfred have all tapped into their European workforces to establish their business across the pond. It was evident early on that C-suite and trading management positions presented skillsets best served by those with long-standing experience. Since then, companies have transitioned to hiring locally to secure the right expertise for understanding the American consumer and the country’s culturally ingrained obsession with sports. But with it being two-and-a-half years since PASPA’s repeal, the talent pool for those with specific gaming and wagering knowledge is extremely small, and largely confined to longstanding casino meccas Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

“The pool is small when it comes to specific industry experience,” Kindred SVP USA Manuel Stan acknowledges. “But we believe that for a vast majority of roles, specific industry experience is not a must. We broadened the search to the financial and banking sectors for the finance, risk, and fraud recruitment, or to sports and sports entertainment for marketing roles, and I think we have done that very successfully as we built a strong team with Kindred industry experience as well as strong local US experience,” Stan adds.

Be aggressive

The downtown New York City-headquartered operator has built out its US team to 40 staffers split between NYC and a satellite office in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. One of Stan’s most recent hires is Mark McLaughlin as operations manager for player sustainability. McLaughlin offers up experience of many years managing risk and fraud at some major financial institutions. “Having an eye for detecting risk and an ability to observe data sets and identify patterns and anomalies is definitely a skillset that is highly transferrable,” says McLaughlin.

“From a compliance perspective, transitioning to the gaming industry doesn’t feel all that foreign to me. Looking at the industry through the lens of risk and fraud, there are obvious similarities [to financial services].”

Kindred has offices in Downtown NYC and Cherry Hill, New Jersey

Like many others in the industry, Kindred has utilized the sports and sports media sectors to source staff, with partnerships and VIP senior manager Phil Valente having spent time at Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. and New York City Football Club. Being based in NYC and New Jersey has opened Kindred up to accessing talent in Atlantic City and new gaming hubs Jersey City, Hoboken and Cherry Hill, as well as the vast spectrum of tech and marketing talent the Big Apple has to offer.

But in the early days, Kindred looked internally to kickstart its journey in the States and relocated a handful of senior employees from its London office. Similarly, UK bookmaker Betfred relocated its Warrington-based UK head of in-play and sports product Andrew McLauchlan to Las Vegas to manage its nascent US trading team.

In six months, the firm has grown to a headcount of 40, having initiated an extensive recruitment drive just before Covid-19 caused many US states to go into lockdown back in March. “During the lockdown and then starting in June we really ramped up customer service and marketing. Thirty of those guys were probably hired in the last three to six months,” Betfred USA COO Bryan Bennett tells EGR North America.

Although Las Vegas boasts a booming betting and gaming tech, product, and risk management scene, it is significantly lacking in marketing and CRM expertise, Bennett says, and, as a result, Betfred extended its search to other industries, eventually hiring an ideal candidate from the online dating world. “For the most part we’ve tried to stay within gaming, for obvious reasons. I mean, all of our compliance people are obviously from gaming. The online marketing side has been probably the toughest in Las Vegas as most of that talent tends to exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” Bennett laments.

“We had a CRM position open for a while and we ended up going into the online dating world. [The company] had a couple of online dating sites, and we plucked a CRM manager out of there and it’s turned out to be a great hire for us. That’s probably the only significant hire we’ve made outside of gaming. Everyone else, especially in customer services, we plucked from some competitors in Las Vegas who wanted to move on.”

DraftKings’ chief people officer, Graham Walters, expresses interest in sourcing skills from the online dating world. “We haven’t looked there but I can see why they would,” he comments. “We’ve had a lot of success targeting consulting firms, like Bain or Boston Consulting Group, as we find that they meet the bar for talent and they think about things a bit differently, more like owners. We want people to think differently as well as people who are smart, quick, comfortable, fast paced. It’s finding those similar types of industries that have some elements of how we operate,” he adds.

All to play for Massachusetts, home to Boston-based DraftKings, boasts thriving tech and biotech sectors as the location of small Google and Amazon hubs, and the main headquarters for software and hardware giant Dell EMC. When it comes to sportsbook tech talent, DraftKings has found many of the required skills for operating real-money gaming have been transferable from its daily fantasy sports business, presenting the firm with a clear advantage over its peers.

Certainly, there was a time when DFS was in its infancy and the firm faced the same difficulties as today’s RMG operators. “As we built out DraftKings, a lot of the people that came in at the very beginning were players, whether they were playing casually or otherwise. They were people that were already passionate about sports and fantasy sports,” Walters notes. “So, we were able to tap into a group of highly engaged people who liked fantasy sports as a whole.” DraftKings has actively promoted cross-pollination between its DFS and RMG businesses as both sides can take learnings from the other and apply it to theirs.

BOSTON, MA – MARCH 26:
at the unveiling of DraftKings headquarters March 26, 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images for DraftKings) *** Local Caption ***

It recently extended its reach to the West Coast earlier this year to leverage the rich technology talent pool of Silicon Valley and San Francisco. DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish has hailed the Bay Area as being a great hub of sports teams and landmarks, as well as an “ideal combination” of design, culture, and technology. The operator also established a tech hub in Dublin, Ireland in February to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google’s engineering talent and maintain proximity to its European B2B clients.

Longstanding head of engineering Dan Kesack relocated from the Boston HQ to the Dublin technology hub shortly after its launch to oversee the expansion of its team of engineers. Two additional Americans followed to help embed the DraftKings company culture into the new arm of the business. Upon acquiring B2B betting supplier SBTech in 2020, DraftKings also gained access to key European engineering hotbeds Sofia and Plovdiv in Bulgaria, as well as Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

“For now, as we have combined with SBTech, we have a pretty good balance of European and North American offices,” Walters explains. “We’re looking to continue to build across the sites that we currently have in place. And I think that we will also evaluate other opportunities. Our tech hubs in Europe will grow, including across Bulgaria and Ukraine. Ireland is another one, from a tech perspective, that we’re investing in.”

Also in DraftKings’ favor is its nationwide brand recognition. The firm has invested heavily in presenting itself as a leading technology company with a deep-rooted culture to draw young software engineers straight out of college. “We view ourselves as competing with companies like Google or Amazon or Facebook, and we target a lot of the similar types of employees,” says Walters.

“We’re able to really transfer our business success to our employment branding success, and leverage that to identify top talent and bring those people inhouse. For us, it’s selling a handful of things: one is obviously the business success; the other is the opportunity. I think a lot of people come here because it’s an opportunity to build something great,” he adds. Walters believes there is room to hire former land-based employees in online roles as certain strengths lend themselves to some of the roles DraftKings operates. “Being able to leverage specific strengths and having an understanding [in gaming history] is valuable,” he says.

Betfred’s Bennett largely disagrees: “From an online perspective, we are trying to only hire people with online backgrounds because it’s such a different skillset than what’s required in retail.” Unlike DraftKings, Betfred has very little brand recognition in the US, having only gone stateside last year. But despite its relative anonymity, it poached its head of IT from Penn National Gaming, its director of product from BetMGM’s Stadium Technology arm, and its customer services chief from William Hill.

Bennett says it is the operator’s startup culture and lack of hierarchy that has attracted these industry veterans. “The idea of being able to build something from scratch in a highly competitive and high growth industry is really interesting to people, rather than being installed in a thousand-person company where everything is already built in,” he says.

Covid-19 fallout

When coronavirus struck in March, Las Vegas’ economy was hit harder than most other cities. Casinos were closed and thousands of employees were placed on furlough, with many resulting in redundancies a few months later. For Betfred and DraftKings, this presented an opportunity to reemploy some of the gaming folk from operators that had taken the difficult decision to wind down their operations. “As other companies may have slowed down, the lack of demand from other places might have helped our ability to attract talent that might have otherwise been competing with other companies,” says Walters. “I think there might have been a benefit just because of a slowdown in hiring from other spots.”

But for Kindred, the pandemic was much more of a hindrance on its hiring efforts, as the US’ ongoing travel ban has caused a temporary halt on relocating workers from outside the country. “We have had to focus more on recruiting locally,” says Stan. “I think that 10% European expertise makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, in 2020 that’s not the case anymore as we hired entirely local because of the visa restrictions.”

Conversely, the transition to remote working brought about by the pandemic has allowed Kindred and others to expand talent pools significantly as firms prepare to extend working-from-home benefits beyond Covid-19. Stan has a target to grow his workforce to 70 by the end of 2021, while Betfred’s Bennett insists his team will also likely double in a year’s time.  DraftKings’ US staff count recently reached 1,246 across all its offices es as the group works towards its aggressive ambition to lead the sector.

A whole new world

So, what exactly is it about gaming that is enticing skilled engineers and marketeers over to the industry? Undoubtedly, the major sporting and media partnerships tying the sector to the wider sports world has marketed betting and gaming as a novel and exciting chance to work with sports and media. And when state regulators report astronomical amounts being wagered on betting ($803.1m during the month of October in New Jersey), keen followers of the industry are seeing huge dollar signs in their eyes.

“The opportunity to join the gaming industry brought with it an opportunity for me to leverage my past knowledge and experience and work in a growing, fast-paced environment where my vision could be realized in real time. This is an industry that is booming in the United States,” Kindred’s McLaughlin relays. For many, the industry presents a way to integrate a love of sports into their career.

Gambling has long proved that commitment and longevity pay off and career growth is frequent. Plus, at this nascent stage in the US, there is room for real disruption in the market and a chance to make a mark. “We’re really early in building out that industry,” Walters concludes. “As people think about it across the US, I think they are excited because this is once again one of those areas that has been really limited geographically to physical land-based casinos.

Hiring people young in their careers and developing them as we have grown has really been our core focus, bringing in those people early in their career and developing them.” US unemployment rates peaked in April at 14.7% during the height of the coronavirus crisis. They have since dropped to 6.9% as many returned to work once state lockdowns subsided. However, despite the decrease, the rate is still double the rolling average of 2019.

And while industries like hospitality have had to scale back operations due to social distancing requirements in response  to the pandemic, online gaming is rapidly expanding and primed to help rebuild the economy.