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One of our tech managers came up with a brilliant idea!
In order to apply for the position, the applicant will be required to post their resume to our API as XML, according to some simple specs. The application must be sent to a URL (provided) via POST, with HTTP authentication (creds provided), where the POST includes some XML that validates to a DTD (provided).
The last time we were hiring, we were spammed with so many inappropriate resumés, it took a lot of effort to isolate potential candidates. I personally attended a few interviews cut short by the question "did you actually read the job description before you applied?"
The job, it must be clarified, does require that the applicant be capable of working with HTTP and AJAX and XML and APIs... so it's not an unfair thing to ask for.
I know this kind of approach is unusual. Many recruitment efforts require the applicant to jump through hoops, but those are usually just the usual recruitment processing rigamarole.
What other novel recruitment filtering ideas have you heard of?
... and yes we all know about Google's nerdy billboards already
Still, hiring is work. You have to kiss a lot of frogs. But, your idea is solid. When I was hiring writers and editors, I eventually came up with the idea to give the top candidates a real life assigement, usually a feature article, with plenty of time to do it. I would pay them our higher freelance rates and have rights to the article, even if we didn't hire them.
It worked so well. You could see who could do what. I got great people this way. It's was scary--some of the features were so bad we could not use. People who said they could use a camera couldn't. And they were finalists. Gad.
As for gaming the system, yeah, you could hire someone on [name any outsourcing site] to do it for you. But round two would be to put them in a room, in-house, and test them again.
A second interview would easily weed out the rest.
Incidentally, its been repeatedly *proved* that interviews do not work, so anything like this can only be better.
The very first programming job I had (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), they did something similar. Candidates were given the specs for a small program and put in a room by themselves where they had a couple of hours to write the program ... on coding sheets!* No testing, just coding off the top of your head and putting it down on paper.
When you were finished (or when time was up) someone took your work and reviewed it. A couple of tiny syntax errors might be forgiven, but for anyone who failed to understand the specs, or who produced messy code, poor logic or lots of mistakes, the interview process ended there!
*For those of you too young to remember coding sheets, they were kind of like graph paper - pieces of paper marked in little squares. One character went in each square.
It also makes sense, sometimes, that you specify which tools-set to use to 'generate' the code. It might be a big factor to experienced programmers as far as I know, e.g. developer is used to Eclipse/Subversion and the internal team is only allowed to use Dreamweaver-MX(6.0)/MSS or something else.
Only if it is a factor also provide a note that says: After being hired saying 'Not in my job description' is grounds for a severe whipping with a wet noodle.
During our last hiring session using craigslist, we created a email address with an autoresponder. The autoresponder had (in this order) an explanation that we know jobhunting is hard, a brief bio of the company, and an open book test (multiple choice) of questions related to the job opening. We received about 130 applications in three days, and of those only 10% bothered to respond to the autoresponder. We were testing for knowledge about Excel functions and ability to communicate in writing. Of the remaining 10% we had three qualified candidates to choose from.
Much easier than poring over 130 resumes.
