What we have done is hired people as contractors when we have overflow work. We'll pay you a high overly rate to do extra work for us each week. They usually al

What we have done is hired people as contractors when we have overflow work. We'll pay you a high overly rate to do extra work for us each week. They usually already have gigs and want some extra cash. Others might be doing contract work full time. But if we really like working together, we chat about making the arrangement permanent. But I wouldn't just do this. I think any company of any size needs a strong internship program to build their own pipeline. I also feel that you should be able to hire people without them doing contract work for you or other kinds of assignments. Talking with someone, going over code and APIs, etc. is usually good enough to gauge someone. If someone has years of experience, has stuff on Git and can talk coherently about what they are doing and why, they probably can program. What I was saying is that if you insist on seeing code first, pay them as a contractor, don't ask them to do a bogus assignment for free.