> When a professional comes in, he expects to be treated like one
How do I know if the person I'm talking to is one of your "professionals," without asking these questions? I need to weed out the pretend professionals.
How do I know if the person I'm talking to is one of your "professionals," without asking these questions? I need to weed out the pretend professionals.
If you need a whiteboard or tests, to tell they are a professional then you may be doing something wrong. I can talk to a person and within 10 minutes tell you if they are a good developer or not. Perhaps it's a gift, but I suspect not, what I suspect is people focus on the wrong parts of what makes a developer a good developer.
People focus on the mechanics of development. Do they know syntax? Do they know the API?
In my time I have forgotten more syntax and API's than I know, I used to be a top notch Pascal developer and could be again in 2 weeks same with Delphi, but today I would be hard pressed to write a line of it. But people get hung up on this, they think a whiteboard, disconnected from information, somehow simulates reality; meanwhile we all use Google, before that it was the development library at your company, Barns and Noble and a host of other printed material. The reality is memorizing little used portions of a languages API is a waste of time (the platform is going to change). For 80% of applications built you are going to use the same simple patterns in whatever platform is being used.
The key is to focus on what you are realistically going to have them do. If you are hiring a CRUD developer they should have a good handle on Data access, Relational or NoSQL theory and web/mobile technologies. Don't ask them to write an algorithm that factors prime on the whiteboard when no one is ever going to write that and even if they are, they are certainly not going to do it in a disconnected environment.
I look for three things, intuition, an inquisitive nature and motivation. Those are the three things that cannot be taught. It has yet to fail me other than the above mentioned anomaly.
People can't talk the talk about specifics of industry experience if they haven't walked the walk, and that will become obvious in normal discourse around the matters of job role itself and their related experiences. You can be inquisitive, but starting off with CS101 quizzes is just condescending and wildly irrelevant to the actual position.
When I'm being interviewed, I respect the interviewer for demanding hard data, instead of just checking who talks the talk.
People have personal projects, accounts in social networks, personal blogs. Make a short list of candidates than go digging. You can soon get a good idea of their abilities and how far they are progressed on their professional evolution path.
That research will also quickly tell you if someone is a jerk. Read what they say and how they are saying it and you will learn all you need to know about their social skills. It's a more precise test than an artificial environment of a face-to-face interview when everyone tries to play an all-around nice person. But the thing is, you can't be a nice person 9-to-5 and a complete jerk in your off-hours. A jerk is always a jerk. Better observe them in the wild when they feel nobody's watching them and they can behave naturally.
It also works the other way. I sometimes encounter overall rude people online who share in passing what company they are employed at. I always try to remember the name to not mistakenly end up there.