I would not recommend this approach if you think personality is more important than technical aptitude.
Then I think you may have partly misunderstood what I was saying in that node, because I think your approach is exactly in line with hiring for personality.

Neither of us would hire somebody with an excellent personality but crappy technical skills. I just have two bars that people must be above -- one for technical skills, the other for personality. Which is the same for anyone. But I will not lower the personality bar one millimeter for a candidate with stellar technical skills. I can understand the temptation, but I think it's one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

As for your pre-interview test, I think that many of the qualities you are looking for are highly driven by personality: coding style, attention to detail, and approach to testing. It's the prima donna types who code with an unnecessarily complicated style, who don't bother to make sure all the details are really going to work for the other people who have to use their code, and who leave what they regard as menial tasks (e.g., testing) to their coworkers. And personally, after a long day spent orking fifty head of cattle, the last thing I want to do is write tests for someone else's "clever" code that follows a slightly different API than we had agreed upon because he decided his way was better.

At the moment, it also doesn't appear that our technical bar is too low. In fact, we've shot down all of the candidates for the position so far on technical grounds. OT: in fact, it appears difficult enough to find a good perl web apps developer that we're probably going to end up hiring a PHP, Java, or Python coder instead. Are Perl app developers really that scarce, or does our job posting just suck? Our recruiter claims that Perl is on the decline for web apps, and that PHP and Python are fast becoming the only real players. I didn't believe her at first, but now I'm wondering...

In reply to Re: Re: How to measure Perl skills? by sfink
in thread How to measure Perl skills? by optimist

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