Technology

In 2006 I had a hard time finding C++ programmers in a university town. 9/10 who responded to the ads were just clueless. Of the remainder, we had a simple test - here's sample code in an IDE that draws a straight line on the screen (you'll be doing graphics programming in the role) - take that code and turn it into a program that draws a sine-wave in the same space... Everyone put computer graphic on their resume's, expressed confidence in their ability to perform in the role, deep former experience, but 5/6 who passed the clueless test couldn't manage that, given unlimited time and resources - the computer has internet access and a browser window open right there beside the IDE- USE IT!!!

Sadly, today we'd probably have to shut off the internet access aspect, or make the test much more difficult. Even AI can draw a sine wave.

A lot of this has to do with recruiters. I've been interviewing for a few years at my company such with as many different sets of recruiters, from recruiting firms to our corporate recruiters, to ones we hired ourselves. Our corporate recruiters handed over garbage candidates who we could often tell wouldn't work out after the first 10 min of the interview, whereas the other two groups of recruiters would do a good job filtering so we'd get than a 50% hit rate on our first round. Unfortunately, we promoted our recruiters once the need for talent dropped (or they moved on to a recruiter firm), and now they're unwilling to go back to recruiting.

The quality of your recruiter matters quite a bit, so you'll want to find someone who is experienced hiring a certain type of person so they know what to look for.