Recruiting staff in the games industry is a dirty and imprecise science. Given that a dev team's value is nothing more than the sum of its individual talents, the stakes are high. There are several well-worn methods, each of which offers different benefits to employer and potential employee alike. With over 60 employees, we've had chance to look at each of these in depth. This is what we've found out.

Recruitment consultants are the most common source of new recruits. The back pages of Edge are full of adverts for the larger agencies and the majority of people in the industry will use them at some stage or another. There are though drawbacks to using them. They're expensive, typically charging 10% to 25% of the recruit's annual salary by way of a finder's fee. They also offer a mixed level of service. The excellence of some is more than matched by the mediocrity of others. Several act as nothing more than clearing houses for candidates, carpet-bombing dev houses with mass mail outs of bargain basement CVs. This helps no one and calls for extensive use of the round metal file.

The work of recruitment consultants also extends to the murky world of poaching, a dirty business that causes a great deal of resentment among targeted companies. Important and senior positions are hard to fill and occasionally head-hunters are called in to do the dirty work. Once again, this offers a mixture of results. The cost is astronomical (sometimes as much as 40% of the starting salary) and the results varied. We very rarely use Head-hunters.

One of our major sources of new recruits is university graduates. The increasing complexity of games, particularly with the advent of 3D, has created a need for programmers with high-powered academic training in science and maths. We take a lot of people from Cambridge every year, because we have excellent contacts there. There are also lots of excellent graduates from other universities and we'd take as many of them as we could, given the time to find them. Getting to them before the city does is a challenge. Persuading them to forego cash and spreadsheets for games, pizza and late nights isn't always as straightforward as you might think. Everyone we've had has been excellent, and their enthusiasm often contrasts with the weary cynicism that often characterises those that have been in the industry for any period of time. If any of you reading this are in your final year, please drop us a line.

That's not to say that academic qualifications are enough in themselves. University can breed complacency and give people an unrealistic appraisal of their own self worth. Equally, a bad degree can be worse than not having a degree at all. I'm always underwhelmed by people who've got 2:2s - if you're going to arse around at university, at least do it properly and get a third. Or do it in style and flunk out. One of the programmers did just that, exchanging the thrills of an Economics Degree at LSE for careers as a boat builder and session musician (complete with soft rock bubble perm). He's also an autodidact who made a living writing and selling his own games for five years. Qualifications can be as misleading as they can be helpful.

Advertising is an established, if expensive method of finding new staff. Turn to the back of Edge and you will find pages of adverts. A full page ad will cost you around £2K, which is a lot of money, though still cheaper than using agencies. What it offers over the other methods is a means of getting people from outside the industry. Tuomas, one of our Lead Designers, previously worked as Head of Games Development at Games Workshop. It's unlikely that we would have been able to recruit him had we not advertised in Edge.

Many people join us through personal recommendations from people who already work here. If a member of the team is prepared to go out on a limb for someone and vouch for him or her it usually means they're alright. Usually they've worked together before. I used to work with my current Producer in my first job at Ubi Soft, where he worked in the tech support department.

Finding prospective recruits is only half the battle, the other half being the interview process. I dislike interviews intensely, not least because I'm cynical about their efficacy as a means of ascertaining someone's qualities. I've done over 200 interviews since the start of Elixir and with all but the minority, you know within the first two minutes whether you like them or not. The sense of power over somebody's career is unpleasant, as is the very nature of the event, which is nothing more than an interrogation lurking beneath the veneer of a friendly chat. Having been on the receiving end of it myself when I was looking for a job, I try to palliate the experience by being blunt and up front. My apologies to those who have suffered from this approach. Nothing illustrates the inaccuracy of interviews more than the fact that one of our best programmers gave the worst interview I've ever seen. Short of insulting my mother, he did just about everything wrong. We took a chance on him and he's since repaid our faith too many times to count.

To finish off, here a selection of my favourite recruitment moments:

• The candidate that turned up to an interview in a skirt (we liked him)
• The artist whose portfolio included work by our Art Manager
• The interviewee that brought a copy of Edge for Demis to sign much to everyone's amusement.
• The person who was approached by head-hunters to see if he was interested in doing his own job