As an employer I need Perl certification to find good programers, and I know that Perl programers want good jobs at Perl. We can do that with certification, but we don't need to make the certification process in the ugly way

I think the question on how to find good Perl developers is an interesting one. As you may have guessed by now I don't think certification is the answer with Perl in it's current state :-)

My tips would be:

• Accept that it will be harder than finding a good developer in a more popular language. Double your normal estimates for time needed.
• Advertise in the right place. jobs.perl.org is the most obvious. Don't rely on a generic recruiter.
• Bonus points for people with CPAN modules and community involvement, but don't ignore those who don't contribute.
• Make the wording on the job advert specific and blunt. If you need somebody with good OO perl don't just say "OO Perl", say "Absolute requirement: must provide evidence of ability to write and maintain reusable object-oriented perl modules. Experience of Class::MakeMethods an advantage." Make it completely clear in the advert that they will not get the job if they cannot do what you need. Don't be shy of spending money on a larger advert. It will save you time in filtering poor CVs.
• Set a pre-interview test. I had some success combining a few moderately sneaky questions (e.g. "What's the difference between $foo->method and method($foo)?") with a "review this code" open question.

Any more?

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