A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But:
In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough.
Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it.
We found this out the hard way. At Matasano, we started our work-sample hiring process[1] as a way of filtering out the smooth-talkers. Before work-sample tests, we'd spent loads of time on carefully designed interview questions; interview design was something close to a hobby for some of us.
Of course, it was only after we started doing work-sample challenges that we discovered that not only were a lot of excellent-seeming candidates actually not capable of delivering, but an even greater fraction of the candidates our "friendly conversations" were selecting out were in fact perfectly capable. It was a bad deal all around.
Whatever you do, don't fast-path "senior" developers. Everyone should run the same process for the same job. Not only do you risk hiring people who won't work out, but you're also depriving yourself of the most important data you need to iterate on your hiring process.
[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough.
Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it.
We found this out the hard way. At Matasano, we started our work-sample hiring process[1] as a way of filtering out the smooth-talkers. Before work-sample tests, we'd spent loads of time on carefully designed interview questions; interview design was something close to a hobby for some of us.
Of course, it was only after we started doing work-sample challenges that we discovered that not only were a lot of excellent-seeming candidates actually not capable of delivering, but an even greater fraction of the candidates our "friendly conversations" were selecting out were in fact perfectly capable. It was a bad deal all around.
Whatever you do, don't fast-path "senior" developers. Everyone should run the same process for the same job. Not only do you risk hiring people who won't work out, but you're also depriving yourself of the most important data you need to iterate on your hiring process.
[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/