[clue-talk] Assessing technical skills?

[Kevin Cullis]

Jeff,

On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:20 PM, Jeff Cann wrote:

> I've hired 2 contractors in the past bit and both are not doing  
> very well.  Both had good resumes, but we relied on verbal  
> interviews where we drilled them on past problems, solutions, etc.   
> I regret not asking for some type of written test / quiz because  
> [based on performance] I think I assumed too much in the  
> interviews.  It's clear that when I put 5 years of UNIX as a  
> requirement, people think 'I had UNIX in college' covers it.  In  
> the end, they are useless at the command line, and this is where  
> 95% of our work happens.

Blame it on bad interviewing and you don't need to do testing. Have  
them read a printout of a recent or familiar CLI script/line such as:

PMG4:~ KC$ ls -alr > kevintest

While this is simple, by asking them to read what is says and tell  
you what it does. Do this on the most COMMON things you do you can  
get an idea as to what experience level they have. If you need to,  
you can get even more difficult.

It's not about assuming too much on the interview, but assuming the  
wrong things. I was once on the Board of Directors of a non profit  
organization and we were tasked with selecting an Executive Director  
we ranked all of the resumes. While I was the most "liberal" compared  
with the others they were more "harsh" on the resumes. But in the  
end, no matter how we RATED them, we all RANKED them the same. Other  
than we switched rankings we all had the same top five.

The sad part is that past performance is NOT a good indicator of  
future performance in this case.

Kevin
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