<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Jeff,<DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:20 PM, Jeff Cann wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Monaco" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Monaco">I've hired 2 contractors in the past bit and both are not doing very well.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>Both had good resumes, but we relied on verbal interviews where we drilled them on past problems, solutions, etc.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>I regret not asking for some type of written test / quiz because [based on performance] I think I assumed too much in the interviews.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>It's clear that when I put 5 years of UNIX as a requirement, people think 'I had UNIX in college' covers it.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>In the end, they are useless at the command line, and this is where 95% of our work happens.</FONT></P> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV><DIV>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:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>PMG4:~ KC$ ls -alr > kevintest</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The sad part is that past performance is NOT a good indicator of future performance in this case.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Kevin</DIV></BODY></HTML>