Something that's worked for me. Relax the hiring process but ratchet up the referral bonus and let teams hire their own devs. People work better when they work

Something that's worked for me. Relax the hiring process but ratchet up the referral bonus and let teams hire their own devs. People work better when they work with people they like. And they hire people like themselves. And they generally won't refer shitty devs if they are the ones that have to work with them down the road. Even with a 3 day gauntlet interview you won't have enough information to determine if somebody is any good. Compare that to a referral that one of your team members has known for years. With this strategy getting good devs is easy but maintaining non discrimination is harder due to human nature so it's best to find a middle ground. Blinding name/sex/age/ethnicity until as far as possible in the process is a good start. And have a coding challenge early in the process. Make sure your most skilled engineers are the ones reviewing submissions. Most teams will flatly tell you who that person is if you ask individually. If your best and most productive programmers are reviewing submissions they will select for the same. The biggest hiring danger for small companies is regression to the mean. Eventually, once you get big enough, the law of large numbers nearly promises you will have average engineers. Since you have so much control over hiring I'll assume you're a smaller player. This is a good place to be when looking for talent. You can have your best engineers hire more great engineers by interviewing them personally. Firing is usually stupidly easy in the US at least so I wouldn't even worry about that.