<i>While we haven’t yet closed the loop and hired anyone from this method</i><p>That's the key measure. To be honest, this is such an old technique that it doesn't seem especially cool or interesting. We've found writing good blog content and working on open source to be effective at finding good people.
HN user randomdrake and I threw together a "standard" for this a few months ago and put it up here:<p><a href="http://www.humanheaders.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.humanheaders.org/</a> and <a href="https://github.com/randomdrake/human-headers/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/randomdrake/human-headers/</a><p>randomdrake actually built a few browser extensions that will read out the headers and show them to you if they exist, which is pretty cool.
This was cool in 2008, maybe even earlier. It's not anything fancy anymore. I was able to view headers of pages when I was 15 and it is probably the worst way of getting applications. Instead, put up a few problems you had while development of your product and get solutions to your recruiting email. See if people can come up with similar or better things. This will make you find better engineers. Headers will get you script kiddies.
Yay this! Another way to bounce off developers is through a humans.txt<p><a href="http://higg.im/humans.txt" rel="nofollow">http://higg.im/humans.txt</a><p>Mine is nothing special, just a simple quote. There is even a whole site that crawls these files.<p><a href="http://humanstxt.org/Standard.html" rel="nofollow">http://humanstxt.org/Standard.html</a><p>Some of them are gold. Get ready to see lots of ASCII art :)