"Design a challenge to evaluate the selected candidates’ skills. Good professionals love challenges. If the candidate refuses to do a challenge, consider this a red flag about their future commitment."<p>To me a bigger red flag is if someone has the time and desperation to put up with this kind of bullshit. Good professionals love money and respect.<p>Edit: IMHO the "unicorn" is someone who is both competent and spineless, which to me sounds like the candidate this article is asking you to find.
"After selecting a winner in the challenge phase, try to work with the candidate in a small project before hiring him. Pay for the hours spent on the project, of course!"<p>It would be difficult to find a winning candidate who is unemployed, or who is employed and has the bandwidth to come in during office hours and work on a project with your team. That being said, performance on a paid "evening hours" consulting project would be a very good hiring metric that I think more companies should use.
These processes are inconsistent. The company can be picky but so can the candidate if they are good. More often than not, companies are approaching the good software engineers to work for them and not the other way around.<p>You end up with this bizarre recruiting process, which I have seen many times, where some company approaches me about working for them because I am one of the best and most experienced in my field, and once I agree to talk to them they treat me like some idiot developer who rolled in off the street. The idea that they would waste a bunch of my time "challenging" me, paid or not, is just bizarre.<p>I can see it for developers with little experience. But no sane person wants to build a team with nothing but inexperienced developers which means you need to learn how to recruit highly skilled software engineers. The outlined process is a recipe for annoying them.
I thought the whole point of the term "unicorn" was to indicate that you are referring to a class of employees/companies who just plain do not exist, but are nonetheless the objects of immense amounts of fantasizing.