Wholeheartedly agree. Make the process a conversation rather than an interview. Get to meet the person, have lunch with them, talk about what motivates them an

Wholeheartedly agree. Make the process a conversation rather than an interview. Get to meet the person, have lunch with them, talk about what motivates them and what they're passionate about, discuss tech stuff, and at some point during that hour or two both you and them will have an idea whether you want to turn it into a steady relationship. :) I like to add a code review stage to the mix, where we show them a small chunk of intentionally badly written code that might come up during a code review, which has both obvious and more obscure issues related to syntax, clarity, efficiency, etc., and you judge how they approach it and what issues they bring up. I've found this to be quite a useful metric that mostly replicates a real world scenario, but in a more comfortable setting than asking them to write code on a whiteboard. And you try your hardest to block any biases for/against them you might have when making your decision.