That's very cool. I think what grinds on most people is the people up stream tend to send lots of low quality leads down the pipe and it burns people out.

> In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process ...

Exactly.. If it's broke "let's all work to improve it". Not "oh no here comes the recruiter again with some horrible candidate".

I don't know about the team you work with but the recruiting team I'm working with is full of bright excited and passionate people who want to learn. They don't code.. SO WHAT.. They know people well, and they're willing to learn. That's all I ask.. from anyone... I can teach you anything.. I can't teach you to have a good attitude and I've yet to find a way to increase people's IQ.. :)

I might not be able to teach you as a recruiter to code, or "be smarter" but I can help you "work smarter" and help avoid burning people out further down the pipe.

> My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing.

4-6 hours and once in a while you get to add 2,000 hours of new capacity to the team! :-)

If you think about the ROI interviewing and getting the right people on the team can be amazing. Much better then those hours spent refactoring 20 lines of code...