Looking at your job description, I'm guessing that you are trying to hire junior PHP/MySQL programmers at maybe a $50,000/yr US range. Nothing wrong with that.

Looking at your job description, I'm guessing that you are trying to hire junior PHP/MySQL programmers at maybe a $50,000/yr US range. Nothing wrong with that. Looking at your coding exercise, it's a small set of code, but it would be more than an hour or two for me (or presumably anyone) to do all of the improvements, find all the bugs, fix them, do the extra credit, make sure it's not sloppy before I turn it in, etc. So way more commitment than just sending in a resume or writing you an email. Reading your blog post, you guys seem to want rock star technical candidates, but with that job description, you're going to attract people who have done a few PHP web sites, maybe customized a Drupal or or Joomla or Wordpress site. When I've interviewed and hired developers, our best ones always came from friends or recommendations, never from job postings or job boards.