This is not the world's best rails hiring process - there's no such thing. The title makes you sound arrogant; it will surely turn some potential hires off.

This is not the world's best rails hiring process - there's no such thing. The title makes you sound arrogant; it will surely turn some potential hires off. Anyways, here are a few assumptions your process makes: 1) Of the pool of Rails developers world-wide that you could hire, the smartest/best ones are among the 10-50 devs that show up to a local rails/pub nite. 2) That there is a strong correlation between the number of reference checks (beyond 3), and the quality of a hire. 3) Bloggers and open source contributors are better programmers than those that aren't. Here are a few things I would change: 1) A take-home project is fine, but I would not expect a potential hire to spend 10 hours. Why can't you think up a problem that takes an hour or so to solve instead? I've hired plenty of sharp engineers by asking them to perform a short take-home. 2) Because your project is now a lot shorter, you could have the candidate do this before they meet face-to-face. This would save you time, and moving the face-to-face near then end of the process allows you gather the most info before committing to a whole day of interviews. 3) A much more interesting phone screen question would be 'What are the disadvantages of TDD?'. I want flexible thinkers, ones who can argue both sides of a point.