Ask HN: Your experience in hiring full-time offshore developers?

I need a developer to help free up some of my time for non-development tasks in my business. I'm having difficulty finding a Rails developer in South Africa and even though we're not the most expensive country in the world, the salaries for developers in some other countries are still amazingly low in comparison.

I'm not necessarily referring to oDesk or other freelancing sites, unless the freelancer went on to become a permanent member of your team. I'm considering countries such as the Philippines or Ukraine, or any other suggested ones.

What's a good hiring process for doing this? Did you have to go through a few developers before finding someone who delivered quality work, or maybe you avoided this through careful screening? Any websites to help find people? (I see that workingwithrails.com has a nice search by country). Any other advice?