Michael Still has posted up about the hiring woes of Tate Needham who is looking for a Junior Developer at VSoft Technologies who make the popular FinalBuilder tool. Tate had a really good hit list of some things to look for when hiring face to face at VSoft.
- Read some code
- Write some code
- Customer liaison
- Reasearch skills
- Using FinalBuilder
At Readify most of the Senior Consultants get involved in the hiring process in one way or another either by using their connections to find good people or actually performing technical interviews.
Usually I am performing a remote technical interview so the first two items are a little bit tricky, although I try to do a bit of research on candidates before I contact them (so those with a visible online presence have an advantage).
The second two items are kind of obvious, you need to be able to communicate effectively and you need to know where to go to get more information. Because we tend to ride pretty high on the technology wave having actively exposed yourself to future products and technologies rates pretty highly.
Use of FinalBuilder is not a requirement for joining Readify, but since I am into team development practices awareness of the problems that it is trying solve is important to me and helps prove to me that candidates have at least a passing interest in producing a quality product in a repeatable fashion.
Personally I use NAnt for VS.NET 2003 generation projects but I’ve heard only good things about FinalBuilder – it definately looks better than my XML scripts 
I guess the secret sauce is the combination of flavours. There are a few traits that folks at Readify share and I actively look for these in candidates because if they aren’t present then the chances are they won’t enjoy Readify in the longer term, and people that aren’t happy don’t make good company representitives.
Sounds like a good topic to discuss over a mug of coffee some day!