I like this overall. I read Joel Spolsky's book on hiring techies and I've tried his interview process for the past ten interviews I've done. Some things work a

I like this overall. I read Joel Spolsky's book on hiring techies and I've tried his interview process for the past ten interviews I've done. Some things work and some things don't. I would add to this article and to Joel's approach that you need to ask some basic coding questions during the telephone interviews to at least pick up on things to review during the in-person interview. Example: for a programming job, I want to know if a person knows the size of an "int" or if they can tell me what the difference between a struct and a class is. If they can't, then I need to make the decision right now to drop this candidate or consider them for a more junior position. Here's what happened to me recently: I have a job opening for a junior programmer (still do actually) and I had a phone interview scheduled. I prepped my notes and asked what I thought were good questions ("Tell me about that job. Tell me about a challenge you had. Where do you see yourself in 5 yrs?"). The candidate breezed through these questions and I was excited. For my in-person interviews, I had decided to use a 10-question Basic Skills test. It is handwritten and very, very easy: "Write out the numbers 1-10 each on a separate line in a console app", "describe how a web app works in detail as though you are describing it to a brand new tech writer". It is timed - it's really, really easy - and I allot up to 20 mins. I handed my candidate the test as the first thing and he failed miserable. Next! My fault for not having a better phone interview process in place.