Hiring Great Developers: The Pre-Screening

Here's a much better approach: use IRC.<p>I've successfully recruited dozens of exceptional individuals through IRC and am surprised that it's not often used for recruitment. Networks like freenode are filled with amazing individuals who are quite amenable to interesting startups. Even with my first company back in '99, when I didn't even know how to code, I found that the developers hired through IRC performed magnitudes better than the ones who came through more traditional hiring processes.<p>Just hang out for a few months in the IRC channels of open source projects that you find relevant; get to know the various individuals; once you find someone that you believe you can work well with, engage them about joining your venture. Easy, effective and the social bond even lasts for years afterwards.

<i>But I am still surprised at how few companies do this</i><p>Because it flags you as a mill, uninterested in the applicant and likely a firm that treats development as a commodity. I'd be willing to bet that the 30% who didn't bother to respond to the challenges included some of your best applicants.<p>You'd never hire an accountant by insisting they prepare a quarterly for you before you ever met them and you wouldn't make prospective truck drivers arbitrarily drive hundreds of miles to an interview.<p>If you want to screen for the absolute basics of rote capability that's what those various certified professional type credentials are for. But just like your little tests, you'll be pre-screening out the best as well as the worst.

There's a major issue with your method. The best developers know they can get jobs wherever they want. What incentive do they have to bother with the extra work?

Wrote it in the post comment, but will write again. The company I helped get traction (Codility) would address many issues people have with remote testing: manual work, some of the cheating and qualitative vs quantitative dilema. I may be biased, due to my former involvement, but it costs nothing to try it, so you can see for yourself: <a href="http://codility.com/demo/take-sample-test/" rel="nofollow">http://codility.com/demo/take-sample-test/</a>

A fine article for hiring adequate or average developers.<p>You can't really hire <i>great</i> developers using any process involving resumes and ads. Hiring <i>great</i> developers involves recruitment. You already know you would hire the developer before you even contact them. The entire issue is can you offer them enough to lure them from where they are now.

We tried it and while it does help to filter out completely clueless people, however cheating <i>is</i> a real problem. This clearly depends on the industry and specifics of the position, but out of three people that hired, two clearly cheated on the remote coding test. This was for a C position in embedded context, and one would think that no one in their sane mind would cheat, and still many people did.<p>So, yeah, good idea, but use with caution as YMMV.

<i>And just to be sure, we disregarded the results from the screening anyway, and based our hiring decisions only on the three onsite-interviews.</i><p>Am I missing something here?

An interesting side note to gather from this is that it confirms something I've long suspected: LinkedIn recommendations are useless. FWIW I have a couple good ones, but I don't think they've ever even helped me get an interview much less a job. I don't think anybody who actually makes hiring decisions has time to look at them; seems the only purpose they serve is to let people who casually cruise your profile know that you are competent.

Posts like these reenforce my dismay at the total and utter devaluation of the education system when dealing with recruiters for full-time positions (15 years minimum of full-time education, but you still need that one final test).<p>That said, I don't have a problem with these tests if the setter understands that they are not there to filter in or out the competent, but instead serve as a filter of convenience because dealing with 60 resumes is easier than 600. This seems an acceptable pragmatic approach.<p>When rubber hits the road a business needs to make money by being competitive. If having read a book on JUnit is your metric for hiring competitive employees, so be it. I can't help but wonder if there is a sizeable amount of latent competitive advantage in the complement of this set.

I simply give them a call and ask them what the most interesting papers they have read over the last year are. Without any forewarning of course. People who are passionate about things know their stuff; and it's not from blog posts or forums that they obtain this information.<p>And I can tell you, if I learn something while on the phone with them then it's a guaranteed good hire.

it isn't about process, it is about people. As Steve Jobs put it : "A players hire A players, B players hire C players."<p><a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&#38;story=How_to_Hire_Insanely_Great_Employees.txt&#38;sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date" rel="nofollow">http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&#38;s...</a>

Interspersing all kinds of rebuttals to complaints others have made about the post inside the post itself looks really defensive. It disrupted my reading.

&#62; I am asking applicants to write some unit tests, to summarise the key point of a Google I/O video presentation that's actually fun to watch. I am asking them to learn enough about a web framework to be able to write a very basic program. I am asking them to review some really dumb code. And since I don't need code-monkeys but people with opinions, I am asking them for their opinion about my protoype: What would you improve?<p>Shit you are kidding right? Or do people just really value their time that low?

Very cool. I'm thinking it would be great if elance-type of sites, or even experts exchange, would have an area where a prospective employer can submit small coding questions to potential employees.