Welcome to the Create Talent Group Blog — It's Been Quite a Ride
Nathalie Mathieu
Apr 29
3 min read
Updated: May 4
By Andrew Glover, Nathalie Mathieu & Karen Sidhu | April 2026
Well, here we are with our very first blog post! This is long overdue, having founded the company 18 months ago, but if you know anything about us, we’re more likely to keep our heads down doing the work instead of talking about the work.
Welcome to the Create Talent Group blog. We're glad you're here.
This is going to be a space where we share hiring insights, market trends, stories from the trenches, and our honest take on what's happening in the world of recruitment. No fluff, no pressure, no BS. Just real conversations about talent, people, and the wild ride of building something meaningful.
But first, let's catch you up on the past 18 months.
Who We Are
Create Talent Group is a relationship-forward recruitment agency specializing in Games, Tech, and Lifestyle industries — from Clean Energy and AI to E-commerce, Fashion, VFX, and Animation.
What makes us different? When you hire us, you get us — Karen, Andrew, and Nathalie — directly. No hand-offs, no junior recruiters learning on your dime. Just three founders with a combined 75 years of in-house experience, deeply invested in getting it right.
Our mission: humanize recruitment through authentic connections. Hiring doesn't have to feel transactional; it should feel like working with people who genuinely care about your success & your brand..
The Past 18 Months
We launched Create Talent Group with experience, not just ambition. Between Karen's strategic talent-acquisition background, Andrew's two-plus decades of building teams from concept to launch, and Nathalie's decades of guiding studios operations and delivery of projects, concept to market, we came in with a network, a philosophy, and a lot of energy.
What we didn't anticipate was just how quickly things would take off.
Over the past year and a half, we've partnered with some incredible companies, from established names to fast-moving startups. Our client roster has grown to include General Fusion, Unbreakable Games, Final Strike Games, Skybound, Visier, Industrio, Vessi, Quandri, Bosa Properties, Moe's, Sunday's, Jenny Bird, JD Sports, and many more.
We've filled roles across the board: C-Suite, Software Engineers, Game Artists, Product Managers, UX/UI Designers, Go-to Market roles, Finance and Operations professionals, and everything in between.
Every single search has reminded us why we do this work.
When the Headlines Hit Home
If you work in tech or games, you already know. The past 18 months have been a lot for our industries.
The games sector took hits that were genuinely painful to watch. An estimated 45,000 gaming jobs were lost between 2022 and mid-2025, with layoffs peaking in early 2024 at over 8,600 in a single quarter, the highest in gaming history. The names are a who 's-who: Microsoft Gaming, PlayStation Studios, EA, Riot, Ubisoft, Epic, Take-Two, Unity. Studios shuttered. Projects canceled. Teams that had been building something for years were simply gone.
Broader tech wasn't faring much better. Nearly 250,000 people were impacted by layoffs across the tech industry in 2025 alone. OpenText, SkipThe Dishes, Amazon, Microsoft, and many others here in Canada felt the impact of the cuts. And behind every headline number were real people; talented, hard-working people - suddenly wondering what came next. Many of them came to us. We felt the weight of that. We leaned in. And we made sure every person who reached out felt like more than a résumé.
So yes — it's been a lot.
But here's the thing: uncertainty is exactly what makes great recruitment more important, not less. When budgets tighten, every hire carries more weight. When talent is cautious, candidates need to feel genuinely excited — not just recruited. Having a recruiter who knows you, knows the market, and tells you the truth?
That's not a nice-to-have. It's the whole game.
What's Next
We're heading into this next chapter with a lot of excitement, expanding our reach across North America, going deeper into AI and emerging tech, and launching this blog because we have a lot to say and think you'll find it useful.
To every client, candidate, and cheerleader along the way: thank you. Genuinely.
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