hiring good employees. iq tests, what else?

Okay, the conversation probably went in a wrong direction. Let's change pace:<p>1) Do you, personally, write code? If yes, that's a good thing.<p>2) You probably know that each employee is like a mini-founder. (If the number of total employees is small, then they could really be a founder.) It doesn't take a smart person to found a successful business, but rather hard work and dedication. People can do really, really well on an IQ test and have no dedication, or they can bomb the IQ test and have so much dedication that they make up for it. Therefore, if the IQ test doesn't have any correlation to how good an employee is, you shouldn't use it to gauge anything.<p>3) At the company I work at, we've put together a programming test. It's difficult and it grills you hard. If you get a 60/160 we'll still consider you (I got around 60% two years ago). The test is followed by every developer in the company spending time with the interviewee, asking them questions. Then the interviewee is asked to go to the white board and do a programming problem that we give him verbally, with no use of an editor or compiler. How he can react to a the stressful situation of being asked to solve a hard problem in front of total strangers says loads about him. But possibly the most important part is that at the end of the day, the decision for hire or no hire is made from a gut instinct by all developers. That's just how humans work, and it does work.<p>The programming test weeds out all non-hackers. We call each semi-promising person in, sit them in a room for an hour and leave them with the test. At the end of the hour we score them and if they do horribly, we send them on their way with no hard feelings. It doesn't use up too much of our time, and finding a great person is worth the effort.<p>You should read <a href="http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html" rel="nofollow">http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html</a> also.<p>Shawn

You could test them on their knowledge of Python. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo</a>

the problem is that i know a lot of really smart people who don't have the self-motivation to produce anything.

Asking a few nearly trivial programming or other puzzles in the initial job listing or in a first phone screen really helps for two reasons: <p>1) it discourages lazy people and resume spammers. Most people want to cut and paste their resume and cover letter and be done. Someone solving your (even simple) puzzle means they might actually be interested in what you are doing. <p>2) You make sure they aren't completely incompetent jokers. They pass the trivial reject.

As a banker, I asked each entry-level candidate to tell me about something that they did that was hard. Basically, I want to know how they will perform when it's gut-check time. The real world will provide occasions where their character will be tested.<p>One positive about this method is that I got to hear some interesting stories, whether it was the kid that started his own commercial hookah bar in college or the one that expelled a friend as a member of his college honor council. It was easy to tell which candidates had the right stuff and which did not. <p>Intelligence is important, but the kid that was voted most likely to succeed in my high school was not near the most intelligent. And for what it's worth, I think the voting was accurate.

Employees? You want people who do as they're told and accept bureaucracy.<p>Essentially the opposite of a founder.

references are the key to hiring. not the "official" ones. Backdoor or referrals are the best. <a href="http://genotropic-orgs.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://genotropic-orgs.blogspot.com/</a>

planning to hire some people soon.<p>any recommendations on how to gauge if they are any good? I need some statistically significant tests that can weed out those loafers. Know of any?