I agree with brian. It will require some good project management on your part, but if you have a good design you should be able to break off some smaller tasks and give them to prospectives on a trial basis. Spec the tasks out fully and make it clear what you want. For example, code it and provide tests to demonstrate it works.

You didn't mention whether it was hourly or piece-work. If hourly, you get a feel for how much time it took them when they report back. Piece-work is where you set an estimated hour value or dollar value for a feature and the coder does the work for that amount. This can be tough when estimating, and you may need to be prepared to be fair if a task ends up being bigger than expected.

Having many smaller, defined tasks also allows you to pursue a few coders. If one or two don't work out, you still have some people working. When you get to the final integration, which can be the tough part, you'll know who you are getting the best work from.

Also, if you know what frameworks you are going to use to build it (what modules) that can help. Sometimes the module authors themselves are contractors, so you can literally get the expert in a particular module or technology working on your project. This has the advantage that they can add features to their module if you really need them.

In reply to Re^2: Hiring Perl Talent, Hiring Perl Monks by cbrandtbuffalo
in thread Hiring Perl Talent, Hiring Perl Monks by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.