List needs and wants, separately. Too many job ads list requirements which they will never find in a combination. As such they attract liars or exaggerators.

List needs and wants, separately. Too many job ads list requirements which they will never find in a combination. As such they attract liars or exaggerators. Your posting should list no more than 5 REAL must haves, preferably only 3. Wants and nice to haves can be long, I would put them in priority order. Describe what the real job is. If you are looking for a maintainer, say so. But I think you might want to also bring in a consulate to clean up your 'ugly codebase'. With that 'ugly codebase' you are almost begging a person to come in and replace the fence. Need to pay that tech debt. Otherwise anyone you hire will either hate the job, or want to throw the fence away. When I interview people I have a set list of questions. Then I have like 5 questions tailored to their resume. 'So tell me when you were involved in the design of space-x what did you do?' Then is often followed by deeper probing questions on their exact role. When looking over a persons resumes I watch out for items that are just bragging. Typically this is a list of too many accomplishments in too short of a time. I look for 3 month jobs where they list items that would be appropriate for a 3 year job. Given your situation I would specifically ask: 'Scenario: you are given a 4000 line program to fix, you look at it, and the code looks like it was written by a child. Just a load of crap. How do you address fixing the code?' You would expect the first question back is: 'What is the criticality of the fix? Does it need fixing now? Do I have time to clean it up?' I worked at one place where this one guy hated when people would rewrite code, but he was the worst, as in he always rewrote others code. Personally I find people who do not see the value in code reviews, are not worth the trouble. They tend to leave 'ugly codebase'.