#2 - Turn the company into a soap opera

Game developers are like simple chemicals.  (No, not because they're cheap and smelly.)  In the right combination, they can make miracles.  Screw up the mix, and you can blow up a city.

There are many ways in which human resource snafus can lead to disaster.  Witness the following horror stories:

• Cat Herding Syndrome: You put together a team of highly qualified pros, but they can't get along.  Within months, they spend more time in the conference room plotting office coups against each other than working on the game.  Project collapses.  (See ION Storm for details.)
• Prima Donna Syndrome: You have one guy on the team who can't work with anybody else, but you keep him around because you think he's irreplaceable.  This sort-of happened to me once: my predecessor at Company X had actually recruited the lead programmer for our online game straight out of jail.  He got along fine with everyone as long as we never tried to check up on his progress or set a deadline; then he went ballistic.  The project ended up 300% over budget, never saw the light of day, and the guy skipped town with the source code.  We would have been a LOT better off getting rid of him quickly and training someone else to take over his duties; no one is good enough to justify that kind of aggravation.
• Misplaced Greed Syndrome: A bunch of 3D artists get together to develop an adventure game.  Only problem is, they can't afford both the hefty salaries they want for themselves AND real programmers, so they make do with amateurs.  Project collapses.
• Unstoppable Inertia Syndrome:  At my first game job, we had one programmer who was so unbelievably bad it wasn't even funny anymore.  Any project assigned to this guy, however trivial, would take 5 times longer than expected and would ship with a feature set cut in half.  He would SCREAM at the computer for hours every day, disrupting the whole team's work.  I caught him snoring on business hours, loudly, more than once.  Better yet: since it was a union shop (!) and he was quite old for a game programmer, he was one of the highest paid people on staff!  After a while, everyone else wanted his head on a stick, morale plummeted, and productivity followed.  However, the boss was a very nice guy who detested conflict, so he couldn't bring himself to fire the punk, who kept his job for over four years.

Don't be afraid to hire a professional recruiter.  The good ones are invaluable.

And a final word of advice: be honest when you are interviewing people.  If you have a mandatory unpaid overtime policy, say it.  If you have no intention of growing beyond a single project team or to promote from within, say it.  It might make recruiting more difficult, but you won't get much good work out of people you lure to your company through false advertising, either.

Step #3