Hiring a Developer Part 1
In the next couple of weeks we will be posting positions for two new developers to work with myself. As a service to the community I am going to post the process I am going through on my blog so everyone can see what I did when hiring a new developer that would perhaps give them a better idea what works and what does not. Down to business!
My Initial concerns. The area I live in is pretty scarce on tech jobs. The school district I work at is the largest employer in the county and the largest provider of tech oriented jobs so pickings are very slim. My boss and I already typed up a brief description of what type of developer we are looking for that will be posted on Dice and Monster. These will be posted on those websites before we formally place a job posting on our website. I didn’t expect to find anyone that is familiar with OSS tooling or many of the other technologies I work with but I figured if I could get someone that at least knows C#, SQL and a couple of other things, that I could teach them the rest without too much effort.
Everytime we post for an open position we get ALOT of people apply for positions that are not even qualified. It seems like many people just throw everything up there to see what sticks so I am not looking forward to the interview process. I am not going to interview people that have no OOP experience because everyone and their mother has created a website for their family that I do not care about =) Bottom line is, there will be alot of applicants to weed out.
The next part that I have thought about is code tests. I have read in alot of places that people have the interviewee do a simple fizz buzz problem or something along those lines. I’m not sure if this is a good indicator of their work but it would at least tell me if they have problem solving skills which IMO every programmer already has, if they don’t then this test will clearly display this.
These are my initial thoughts on the process. When we get closer I am sure I will have some interesting posts on what works and what doesn’t. If anyone has anything to add please comment!