Trust your gut.

I’ve interviewed literally hundreds of candidates over many years (possibly in the thousands territory now that I think about it) and one takeaway to share is that if you need to use an Excel spreadsheet to try computationally derive and convince yourself that someone is a right fit – that’s your automatic cue that it’s probably not. Especially when on the surface they’re technically hitting all the checkboxes, but your management spidey-sense is telling you something doesn’t fit, and analytically you try to prove it yourself that they are; that spidey-sense is coming from your intuition, which isn’t something you want to ignore.

And when you do find a candidate that’s the right fit, it’s clear as day. Or “right as rain,” as the Oracle from the Matrix would say. On a separate note however, sometimes you stumble across *amazingly* talented people, and although they may not be the right fit for the particular role you’re hiring for, in that situation you either modify the role or create a new one. Do everything in your power to find and attract talented people!

I recently wrote an article for RIARockStars regarding my take on the CF ecosystem and my challenge as a manager to find talented CF developers – along with some our hiring strategies to work around that. I’ll follow up soon with a follow up post more focused on putting together a hiring strategy for managers of Flex and ColdFusion developers.

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