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hiring.mkd

How to Hire Developers

  1. Go to the events the type of developers you want to hire go to. Do this even when you aren't actively hiring.
  2. Try to sponsor or otherwise support the events/groups/newsletters/things the type of developers you want to hire like. Do this even when you aren't actually hiring.
  3. Favor smart people who fit your culture over resumés that check your requirements boxes.
  4. If you can't find enough examples of work to suffice, and must do a technical assessment, try to fashion a low-pressure one. Example: Make an empty private GitHub repo. Give them a task / thing to build and have them make it a pull request to that repo. If you aren't going to bring them in for an actual interview after they submit their homework, at least provide feedback on the pull request. If you are going to bring them in, chat with them about their homework, including talking casually about things they might do differently, or things they might add.

Why should you do 1 and 2 when you aren't hiring? You might be hiring eventually, at which point you'll probably already know who you want to hire, thanks to all the relationships you've created from doing those things. Good job, you!

More good ideas in CONVERSATIONAL DEVELOPER INTERVIEW QUESTIONS.

@armilam
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armilam commented Jan 29, 2016

Here's something I've been using with a good amount of success. I admit it's an extension of #4, but sometimes coming up with exercises is difficult.

Find a problem already solved in your company's codebase. Make it something with multiple parts, some easy and some more challenging. Don't make it too hard. Use that as a programming exercise. This will show you some key things about your candidate:

  • How do they organize their code?
  • Do they know what they're doing in a relevant codebase?
  • Can they work with requirements?
  • If you sneak in a non-obvious incorrect detail in your instructions or example code and they find and address it, that shows they have attention to detail.

Most recently, I was hiring a front-end dev. Showed him a screenshot of a portion of our web application with a fair amount of CSS, HTML, and some Javascript work. Asked him to recreate it. Getting it to work would be easy. Organizing it well and doing it without a lot of hacks would be more advanced.

If you can build up a small library of these tasks, then you can have relevant exercises for all kinds of candidates.

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