The Human Resource

It's easy to get drawn in as an industry player by an array of different resources for production; minerals, ores, ice, gas. All serving a purpose to drive us in New Eden to the inevitable pewpew while in constant pursuit of the almighty isk.

Its equally easy to get distracted as a PvP'er by the never ending hunger to lock down the perfect target with you and your buddies, say the word and extract tears as someones hard-earned ship vaporizes into a cloud of gas, fumes, and essential fluids.

I've made the observation that Corporation's in New Eden tend to underestimate EVE's most valuable resource: The Human Resource.

Many corporation's get a solid group of players and think "That's it. We've recruited. Lets go blow shit up/mine/rat/mission." Down the line, however, these people will tend to run into a very real problem. By fault of inactivity, Real Life, family agro, burn out, or conflict, your people may very well fall off the map for you.

Many CEO's, myself included, have neglected the idea that major businesses in the world have long considered a principal rule-of-thumb: one-out, one-in. This meaning that once you lose an employee (or in our case, a player), you immediately begin the process of replacing him.

Now everyone here knows that recruitment and HR management (Yes, I used that term) in EVE is not so simple as to be governed by one rule. But this is a good starting point for CEO's who may have let recruiting and personnel management become a back-burner issue. I highly recommend that CEO's make this a top priority. Allow me to explain.

Last month, Genesis Invictus was hit hard with a war that came from within. We were wardec'd by a member of one of our member corps. The individual was frustrated at some of our policies and our handling of certain situations. While most of leadership, myself included, felt his concerns with overly critical and unwarranted, he felt that it was a very real problem. We, as an alliance, failed to provide adequate means for this individual to have his concerns seriously considered. As such, he hired a merc to wardec us without us knowing.

The Merc was very good, and long story short, he was able to cripple our industry wing and our navy that we had put together. Due to poor HRM infrastructure in our alliance, a grievance turned into something that put our alliance on life-support.

Currently we are getting things back on track, but due to poor investments in recruitment and HRM, we are now finding ourselves back to square one, recruiting new players, posting our recruitment ad in the eve-o forums, ect.

The moral of this story: its critical to consider the most valuable and potentially lethal resource that we have available to us in this game. Other Human Beings.

For those out there that feel that corporations in Eve are just pixilated internet spaceship groups of strangers... for the most part you're right. But there is a new, very real aspect that many of us are exploring as CEO's. The idea that in order to be a successful internet spaceship support group for wayward gamers (corporation for short), you need to have a functioning and effective Human Resource Element to the organization.