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The very senior development type jobs usually have in-depth technical interviews. The interviewers are senior techies and they ask many design and technique questions such as 'explain how you would do zyx in this scenario' . "what was your role in this project". "if you have code scenario A, explain what you would do to meet this new requirement B.".
"when ABC stops working and you have to fix it right away, explain the steps required to identify the problem and explain what you would do to fix immediately and also explain what you would do for a long term solution."
You expect a senior developer to explain, on the fly (during the interview), how to solve techical issues. And they should be able to verbally explain several scenarios explained where they actually have hands on work experience ...down to a very technical level. You need to know exactly what their role was on the team and what others did. Some BSers will explain tasks that others completed and make it seem like it was their own. A few Q and A that digs deep enough will identify if they did the hands on task. Because the BSers will flounder if you dig deep enough with the Q and A.
In other words, you need someone to interview the candidate that knows as much as the candidate...to decide if the candidate really knows their stuff or if they are simply have a small amout of experience mixed with buzzwords.
There ARE lots of great developers out there. But there are also lots of embelished resumes. Before you hire, you want the interview process to weed out those that are BSing.
If you don't have the in-house skill set to properly weed out candidates during the interview...than maybe get with some recruiters and go with 90 day temp-to-perm. Keep them if they are good and keep going through them until you find a good fit. It's kind of like a 90 day interview.
The more technical bullet points that you put on your job ad, the more you will pinpoint the exact type of candidate you need. If your job ad is too general, you might not be getting what you really need as far as applicants.
If you really want the best of the best, then allow yourself to attract the perfect candidate that might be 1000 miles away. How do you do this? You offer it as a 100% telecommute position. But you make the job ad very detailed. Great programmers have lots of jobs to choose from. They will be more likely to choose a telecommute job.
Interesting. Yes, I've always used a few of my senior developers to assist in interviews for this reason. I am thinking perhaps we are a bit too ad hoc and must develop a bit more regimented criteria selection. I am clearly not doing something right so I suspect I need to analyze exactly what my issues are with finding the talent. I retain them fine once I get them but the actual finding of said skills has been my difficulty.
I can tell you, being a young one myself, and working with young ones, we aren't wasting time with old frameworks like .NET and Java, at my current job I'm tasked with getting rid of that mess and using an alternative. Most senior people I know just moved on to management.
I hear ya but my clients need those skills. There was another project I passed on which had a very, very archaic framework. I tell you - if they had found anyone with the skill to code in that environment, that person could have written their own check. So, something to keep in mind is that if you have a client who must maintain an older framework for any reason, the ability to code in these environments is bankable.
If my business model was to simply throw everything away and start from scratch, that would be fine. Sometimes I advocate that to my clients. However, in this day and age, you can't do that for everything.
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