Here is my hiring process for Rails developers. This continues some thoughts I shared in a guest blog post on Ruby Inside, called 11 Tips on hiring a Rails Developer.
1. Meet developer at a Rails Pub Nite (or similar). Collect their email address & phone number.
2. Research him/her on LinkedIn, WWR whatever Google turns up. Look for a personal Rails blog, social network memberships, and open source contributions.
3. Quick phone screen with candidate. Don't waste time… I pepper my sell job on the company with 2 or 3 techie questions. (Examples, how does OpenID work? Do you do TDD? What do you think about {blah} which was just committed to Edge Rails?)
4. One-on-one interviews with me, and select colleagues as necessary. Grillin' Time!
5. Project. This is the part that people find interesting. If a candidate gets this far, I give them a challenging coding project. (Our 3 LearnHub developers, Carsten, Wes, & LiBin all independently reported spending 10 hours on their projects.) The interesting part is that I pick projects that create a win/win/win situation.
- Company Win: We get a chunk of code that we need.
- Community Win: Open source. (Carsten's Email Veracity Plugin has had several 1000s of downloads.)
- Candidate Win: Notoriety in Rails community (Carsten's is being included in the new book Advanced Rails Recipes.)
(Note that we haven't open sourced Wes' yet, and LiBin's Fliqz4R was just released.)
6. References. I ask for 10-15 references. Seriously. I can do this because I am fast… I can knock out 4 or 5 reference checks in an hour. Its really not that big of investment of time, if you are are really serious about the candidate. Order the reference checks by what you guess will be least interesting to most interesting. That way you can hone your questions for the best references.
7. Offer. I always present offers face to face, and go over all the details carefully. We have an employee stock options pool, and I enjoy in explaining the exciting possible upside ($$$).
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