Married Inc.

I’ve sometimes shared our hiring process with other entrepreneurs privately. (Good feedback this weekend on it at the Founder’s Lunch.) This morning I was sharing it again this morning with an entrepreneur in San Fran, who likes our pattern and suggested I open source ‘er.

Killer developers, Wes & Carsten

For background, there’s my guest blog post on Ruby Inside: 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer. (The comments are the best part.)

1. Meet developer at a Rails Pub Nite (or similar). Collect email & phone num.

2. Research him/her on LinkedIn, WWR… whatever Google turns up. Look for 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 ($$$).

That is all. Your mileage may vary.