"don’t interview anyone who hasn’t accomplished anything." -- OK, perhaps it works as a guideline, but not a replacement for a recruitment process. You could as well advise to hire only Stanford graduates or Topcoder champions, they are pretty much guaranteed to solve FizzBuzz in 5 minutes, no need to check that. My strategy is to sift as large pool of candidates as I can, test whether they can write code in the first place (use Codility [http://codility.com], saves me loads of time), then talk to them to verify whether they can think independently, communicate, get along well with the team and so on. Sure, accomplishments may suggest that your are not talking to an average Joe, but whether this Joe can write solid code is another subject. If he can, he won't mind confirming it in the recruitment process, if he cannot, you never ever want to hire him as a programmer.
Since we replaced recruiters with on-line programming tests (we use Codility), I never had to talk to idiots in interviews again. From recruiters we have been getting mostly well-spoken bullshitters.
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"don’t interview anyone who hasn’t accomplished anything." -- OK, perhaps it works as a guideline, but not a replacement for a recruitment process. You could as well advise to hire only Stanford graduates or Topcoder champions, they are pretty much guaranteed to solve FizzBuzz in 5 minutes, no need to check that. My strategy is to sift as large pool of candidates as I can, test whether they can write code in the first place (use Codility [http://codility.com], saves me loads of time), then talk to them to verify whether they can think independently, communicate, get along well with the team and so on. Sure, accomplishments may suggest that your are not talking to an average Joe, but whether this Joe can write solid code is another subject. If he can, he won't mind confirming it in the recruitment process, if he cannot, you never ever want to hire him as a programmer.
Since we replaced recruiters with on-line programming tests (we use Codility), I never had to talk to idiots in interviews again. From recruiters we have been getting mostly well-spoken bullshitters.