I couldn't agree more with this approach. I have a similar story that recently proved to be quite successful. I was working on a project myself, that I kept ge

I couldn't agree more with this approach. I have a similar story that recently proved to be quite successful. I was working on a project myself, that I kept getting stuck at a particular point. It could just have been that I was looking at it, by myself, too long and was too close to the problem that I couldn't solve it. I was looking for Rails devs because 5KMVP started getting more requests for work. I got a few recommendations and people reached out to me about that freelance Rails position. I whittled down the list to a few I was interested in and I decided to do exactly this. I created a mini-spec of the problem I was trying to solve, pushed the codebase to a private bitbucket repo and added the guy I was evaluating. Told him what I wanted completed, and told him I would pay him to complete that micro-job. If it works out, then we will move on to other projects. Once he finished the project (in a few days) we both walked through his solution. That was such an insightful process for me, because I got an inside look into the way another developer thinks. I even learned from his approach, from his code style and was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the output. Going through the 'post-code analysis' also allowed me to see how he communicates in the way that I will really communicate (which is via Email and Skype). I have since hired him and I love working with him. We do have things to work out - specifically on the communication side, but I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome of the little experiment. For a relatively small amount of money, I was able to a) Learn an interesting approach to solving that particular problem, b) learn new coding approaches, c) figure out how he communicates, d) see how we would work together - he didn't understand something, so he asked questions while he worked through it, e) he was able to do all of that at his leisure - not necessarily through a timed examination. It's a wonderful screening tool - and while I am not sure how that will scale - that has been my experience with this approach too. I will definitely continue hiring freelancers like this....by the way, I only did this after I looked through his Github account and checked out any projects and web properties he had online. That's the first line of screening from my perspective. Edit 1: I thought I should add that I think that this worked so well for me, because this was a problem that I had been tackling for weeks and couldn't solve. So I was intimately familiar with the inner workings of the problem and so could fully appreciate the solution.