The vast majority of candidates I've personally rejected did manage to sound like they knew what they were talking about … until I asked for simple pseudocode.

The vast majority of candidates I've personally rejected did manage to sound like they knew what they were talking about … until I asked for simple pseudocode. Most every coworker who's done interviewing has said the same, as have many commenters here. It's just too easy to talk a good game, so I can't see a basis for recommending anyone I haven't actually worked with. > They seem to not have face to face interactions with other people in their field. That has very much been my experience, and the whole meeting-strangers-at-trade-shows thing seems similarly atypical to me. I've never known anyone who does that who wasn't dedicated to sales or marketing or biz dev full-time. I've been looped into maybe a dozen phone conferences and three in-person meetings with customers and partners in the last four years, and there's one guy (from our first API integration) who I could reasonably expect remembers my name without a CRM search. Dunbar's number doesn't leave room for very many of the semi-celebrities you're describing, and they're all going to be extroverts anyway, so I just get recruited by former coworkers (and the obligatory headhunters).