As a recruiter, what shortcuts can I use to tell if a person can do the job?
2 by niccl | 5 comments on Hacker News.
We're a tiny development group providing analysis tools and reports to support a consulting group. There are just three full time developers. I've recently been made tech lead. Prior to starting here 3 years ago I'd been contracting/self-employed for 20+ years, so I've got very little experience of the recruiting process. I've been largely responsible for hiring developers (usually on contract) for a couple of years here, and to be honest my hit rate is not good. We've had a couple of outstanding people, some ok, and some ... less so. I've read many articles here about how hiring is broken, long interview sequences don't test what matters, etc., and I don't have the time, skills, resources or experience to come up with a massive interview protocol anyway. We seem to do stuff that's out of the normal experience (Python to create thousands of individual reports on thousands of rows of postgres data per report) so the pool of candidates here is limited. I think I know what I want: A maintainer who can find their way through an ugly codebase and quickly fix bugs that are identified by people who know the business domain thoroughly but are sometimes not good at translating the problems they see into words that make sense to a developer who doesn't have that underlying understanding of the business domain. And who understands about Chesterton's Fence Are there effective techniques that can help me sort the good from the less good, and if so what are they?