Post your jobs to the typical sites. Manage the resumes yourself (for the position you're hiring).
People say hiring is one of the most important things you do, then they turn it over to the car salesmen of the IT industry and can't figure out why they're getting shitty results.
How this is so hard for companies/people is beyond me.
I agree with you about recruiters, but that would still leave the rest of the chain in place. So instead of getting your candidates through recruiters, you put out job ads and get candidates. This might improve your success rate in getting good candidates in for that first interview…
But after that? If an employer is still doing fizz buzz, adding branches to binary trees, seeing if they can write an outer join, quizzing them about ruby syntax - the approach is still pretty bad. Just not quite as bad as when they start with a recruiter.
My goal is to never do another technical interview again. The way I'm trying to do this is by expanding my contacts - and I don't mean exchanging business cards, I mean open source projects where I work technically with a large and wide spread group of people in a number of different organizations. People think you need to be some "rock star" to do this, but really, you don't. Keep in mind, it doesn't need to be the equivalent of being a major contributor to rails or the apache server. They can be business apps with a smaller install base and maybe a dozen or so developers. The key is, at any given moment, there are several dozen developers at perhaps 6-12 organizations that wouldn't need to ask you about binary tree traversal because they have already worked extensively with you. You've done presentations and code reviews, you've made contributions to the code base, you've fixed bugs. If they had a question about certain tech issues, they'd probably call or email you.
Unfortunately, this still describes a relatively small number of jobs. Most orgs aren't willing to make their own code base open source (reducing hiring opportunities for developers), and almost by definition most people doing this already have jobs (reducing hiring opportunities for employers_s who want to get away from the unpleasantness of the hiring process. Get involved in meaningful open source projects, and develop a good reputation for your work. Blog about your technical breakthroughs. See if you can speak at conferences.
I also would say that this isn't at all easy, and that people with this sort of ability are likely to find other opportunities outside software development with better pay and greater career prospects.
I agree completely. You need a "rockstar" if you're doing a rockstar project. 99% of projects don't even approach that level of need.
I found simply talking to people about development gave me more than enough to know whether they could develop or not. It's hard to fake out someone else that's knowledgeable. Now when you have managers who haven't been engineers doing the interviewing, they have to focus on other shit because they have no idea how to differentiate. I've dealt with that so much in my career I've pretty much given up.
Post your jobs to the typical sites. Manage the resumes yourself (for the position you're hiring).
People say hiring is one of the most important things you do, then they turn it over to the car salesmen of the IT industry and can't figure out why they're getting shitty results.
How this is so hard for companies/people is beyond me.