7 talent hacks you can use when hiring

Normally, I don't like nice and tidy coding quizzes. But I'd actually kind of enjoy finding the first 10 digit prime in Euler's constant.

Of course it isn't an actual interview question, it's just a question you need to answer to get to the page where you apply for a job.

One thing I'm curious about… suppose someone does an a-ok job with the euler's constant question. How predictive is that of success on the job? How much more predictive would it be to ask that person a lot of data structures stuff and so forth?

I guess what I'm getting at is, how useful are the intense, deep technical grilling we often go through for interviews. let's say you don't like them, but take a more moderate position that there will need to be some coding, and it can't be too trivial and easy (like fizzbuzz).

So you ask a question that's a little tougher, and perhaps not anticipated, like this euler's constant problem. If someone gets a "passing" grade on this (ie., there could be better efficiencies, but all in all, they present an approach that works), how much more predictability do you get out of spending an additional 8 hours on sql outer joins, binary trees, cycles in linked lists, and so forth?

It seems to me those EA and Google billboards are going to help you attract smug, arrogant people who may be talented, but whose talents are almost certainly going to be overshadowed by their own egos, or people who are good at looking up trivia and may or may not be talented otherwise.

In other words I don't see how such gimmicks work to actually find real talent that can actually be leveraged.

Base CRM which got R&D in Krakow, Poland once made a billboard with this link http://notaplaceforyou.com/ just next to the office one of the biggest IT companies in the city (and some smaller).

If you are looking for talented developers/designers etc. for your SV startup, just let freelancers from other countries telework for you.

Wow, these are so egregiously annoying I'd probably not take a job fixing online service security at Apple[1] if it were promoted through these techniques.

[1]: Pretty much either the best job or the worst job possible.

And now I've just hidden my email on GitHub.

"Check this shit out" - whatever point the author is trying to make is severely diluted by this.