This is really happening: Staffing, employment and job hunting are now truly heroic pursuits. You can tell, because they’re being developed into full-fledged video games.
We’ve seen signs of this. The Job Search Ninja, for example, helps job seekers navigate through some of the pitfalls associated with resume writing and answering interview questions.
But this holy bonding of staffing and video games looks more like what Wired Talent might look like if the developers overthrew the executives.
Check out the recent trailer for Brave Company, a new game for Nintendo 3DS from Namco Bandai. It’s just a trailer right now – the game doesn’t drop until October – but the English description of it sounds a lot like what we do every day.
For one thing, Brave Company is a “hero management simulator” – you, the player, are the president of a staffing agency for superheroes.
Your job: Interview and hire the heroes, then send them out to conquer the world. The trailer says that this consists of “killing monsters or finding treasure.”
Here, the staffers are knights and archers 
and priests and so forth. Which is nice, considering the goal of the game is the same as it is when you’re working with accountants and administrators and IT people: to build your agency from a shack to a multi-facility superpower.
Brave Company is just the tip of the iceberg, it seems. If there’s a true merging of the staffing industry and the video game industry afoot, the guys at Novel Incorporated seem to be right at the confluence.
“Novel is about helping you recruit the right candidates for your organization,” the company says first and foremost.
Essentially, the company is working on turning the job application and screening process into a video game – with the same power and technology that goes into the big brand name games you hear about every day. The goal for Novel is to “upend the way prospective employees and employers find each other.”
That’s easier to digest when you find out that the team behind it consists of an Entrepreneurs’ Organization Student Age Entrepreneur of the Year recipient and the lead designers for Asherson’s Call, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and The Matrix Online.
Brayden William Blaine Olson, founder and CEO of Novel, has also secured about $2 million in venture capital for the company.
We’re hoping for multiplayer, strategic and/or action genres. But no single-person shooting games, please …
