i’ll say the thing most talent leaders are feeling but not saying out loud.
recruiting gen z is getting harder, and the old tools are quietly falling apart. career fairs cost more and reach fewer of the people you actually want, and nobody can really prove the return. your careers page gets read by people who are already looking, which is not the problem you need to solve. and underneath all of it there’s a harder truth. for a lot of respected, established companies, the employer brand is aging. the brand your parents admired is not the brand a nineteen year old is dreaming about. gen z isn’t rejecting you. they’re just not thinking about you at all.
you can’t fix that with another booth or a nicer photo of smiling interns on the careers page.
so where did the generation go. they went to roblox. and i don’t mean “kids playing games”, i mean roblox is now one of the biggest social platforms on earth, and gen z and gen alpha spend more time there than on most social apps. it’s where they hang out, where they figure out what’s current and what’s old. for a recruitment team that’s a channel hiding in plain sight, because the exact people you’ll be fighting to hire in three to five years are already there, every single day.
ikea is the example everyone points to now. in 2024 they built a co-worker game on roblox where players actually worked shifts, helped customers, got promoted, and then, this is the wild part, ikea hired a limited number of them for real, paid at the real hourly rate, with a cv and a digital interview. a furniture company ran a real recruitment campaign inside a video game and it worked, and it got covered everywhere. that press wave is the actual product, more than the hires.
but here’s where i want to be useful instead of just hyping it, because most brands are about to get this wrong.
you do not need to go as far as ikea did. actually hiring people through a game is the hardest, most expensive path, and it’s not where most of the value is. the value is the coverage and the buzz. a native roblox experience, built well and made to travel, does three things at once. it makes your brand feel current again, basically overnight, in front of the exact generation that had written you off. it plants you in a space your competitors haven’t claimed yet, and being early in your sector is a position nobody can buy back later. and it lets a young audience that never once considered working for you discover, while they’re playing, what a career with you actually looks like.
and here’s the trap. building the experience is the easy part. everyone can build a branded world. the graveyard of roblox is full of brand worlds that launched and sat empty, because nobody brought the players. distribution is the whole game, and almost nobody budgets for it.
that’s the part i care about, and honestly it’s why i think we’re built for this specifically.
i didn’t come from marketing. before any of this i was a creator, i built an audience of over a hundred thousand on youtube in the roblox space, which means i spent years learning the hard way what makes this generation stop and watch, and what makes them leave in three seconds. that’s not a media theory for me, i lived it. at empire studio we take that and we build the native experience, then we push it through one of the largest french speaking roblox creator networks we’ve built, so the thing doesn’t just exist, it trends. on a recent activation we drove over fifteen million organic views in forty eight hours with zero paid spend, which is the muscle most agencies selling roblox simply don’t have. and then we measure the whole thing in a format your teams already read, so it’s not some orphan dashboard nobody trusts.
so to be clear about what i’m actually saying. every employer brand serious about the next generation should be on roblox, not in two years, now, while the space in your sector is still open. you don’t need a giant budget or ten hires through a game. you need one experience that travels, real distribution behind it, and the coverage that resets how young people see you.
if you lead employer brand, recruitment, or early careers, and this has been quietly nagging at you, that instinct is right, and it’s the easy part to solve.
i’m quentin fassion, founder of empire studio. we connect brands to gen z and gen alpha through native roblox activations, and we make sure they actually get seen. if this is on your radar, i’d genuinely like to talk it through.