How do you hire the best people?

Seems like a simple enough question, does it not? You have an open position, you publicize it, sit back and watch the resumes poor in, then pick the person who's best qualified. Simple. Or is it?

What exactly is meant by "qualified?" Education? What type? University? They may have the some fundamentals down, but can they apply them along with the best practices to truly contribute to the team? Experience? In what role? Programmer for a management job? Perhaps. C guru for a Perl job? Why not, such a person should be able to adapt, right? Career Perl programmer? How useful is someone with knowledge of only 1 tool? Can they adapt when the job requires something else? Then again, we could always just train one of those math majors again, that almost worked last time...

How about the type of person? Do they work well in a team environment? How can we tell? An hour-long interview? Lucky if we can weed one person out without any false positives. References? Useless in 99% of cases. Open source project involvement? A decent check, not everyone has it though and the environment is rather different. How about professionalism? Is this genius going to end up posting all source code he or she has access to online (don't laugh, it's happened). What about our licensing? Are the best people going to jump at the chance to work on source code very few will see? Is the creation of the product itself satisfying enough?

Enough about them, how about our company? How can we attract the best? Traditional ways of higher salaries and company prestige only seem to do so much. Cool technology? That changes all the time and only so much of the work is development from scratch. Career progression? Only so far before it's not advantageous to our company. How do we keep the best people? Keep them current on the best practices?

Perhaps a more proactive approach would help. How do we find the very best? The obvious big names usually seem more content working on open source projects of theirs, publishing, teaching, or other such activities. In addition, there are relatively few such people around. Checking newsgroups? Hard to find much intelligence displayed there to begin with. Maybe this isn't as simple as it first appeared.

Now that I've finished babbling on, what do you view as the ideal coworker/employee and how would you attract such people to your company (in reality, or hypothetically) and keep them there? Thanks in advance for your replies :)

In reply to (OT) Finding the Ideal Employees by Anonymous Monk

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