DO: Mitigate your risk

It doesn’t matter how technical you are. You can be the most experienced technical hirer in the world and still not be 100% sure you’re making the right hiring decision. Therefore, it helps to set up a series of risk mitigation strategies to ensure that you’re continually qualifying the candidate at every stop of the hiring process. Below are some of our suggestions:

Set up an objective vetting process

Use a third party, whether it’s another developer, a recruiter or even a qualified client to help vet certain candidates who send through their CV or portfolio. It helps to have somebody validate or dispute your own opinions before you commit to bringing a candidate in or not

Create a test project.

Put the candidate through a test that best encapsulates the skills described in the original position description. This tends to get most developers, since most people (not just developers) overestimate their capabilities or exaggerate them in interviews.

Backup everything

Protect yourself against the absolute worst downside. Save whatever existing data you have by backing up all databases or source code and by remembering to ‘commit’ any project changes to Git (see What is Git article) before a new developer digs under the hood of your source code.