1) Make sure your personalities meld - I hired people multiple times for their coding chops when we didn't necessarily 'jive' and it made working with them over

1) Make sure your personalities meld - I hired people multiple times for their coding chops when we didn't necessarily 'jive' and it made working with them over a long period pretty painful, especially when brainstorming or doing stuff like critique 2) Make a test with problems unique to your space - aka if you write scheduling software, have the test use some date/time functions or if you write a search engine have them write a simple DOM tree parser. Nothing crazy complicated, but enough to give you an idea of what they are made of. Let them take the test home to complete, then give them feedback about their answers after they return it and see if/what changes they make in response to your feedback. This gives you a good idea if they are willing to adapt and learn in your problem space, and if they can take constructive feedback.