Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong
I worked for a German startup too and our main problem was not vetting interviewees but finding people who want to interview at all. In the five year history of the company I think only one single person was hired who was not already friends with someone at the company.<p>Other people just never applied. I remember manning the booth at one of those college campus events and it was very lonely. I probably talked to three students that day. Nobody followed up with us. I even had the distinct feeling that students avoided eye-contact with us and made beelines for the booths of the big established companies.<p>In the end, our hiring interview process for interns was 'do you want to work for us? yes? you're in' and for full-time applicants it was simply non-existent. I think in the last three years we did not interview a single person.<p>I often wondered why that is but I have never found a good answer. In the end it worked out for us. The company was acquired by Google.<p>Still, I would have liked to have some applicants and interviews once in a while because I keep reading so much about them and I wanted to practice being an interviewer to avoid pitfalls as described in the article.