Hiring good developers is challenging. There’s a small bit of science and a lot of art. Even when a hire is brilliant, he or she might not work out. When hiring, you don’t just want a list of experiences, technologies and languages… You want a person who exemplifies being a self-starter (rather than just listing it as a buzzword on the resumé) who is also smart and can get things done. You’re hiring a personality as much as a liste of skills and experiences.

One tool that I’ve found invaluable is the use of blogs. That’s how we hired Jon Galloway who is a total superstar. As I told Jeff Atwood recently in a conversation, not having a blog won’t disqualify a person from my consideration, but it certainly helps. Otherwise I would want a strong recommendation from someone I know and trust. I have just been burned with bad hires too many times over the years to rely solely on a resumé and an interview.

To make it more difficult, once you identify a superstar, you should not be surprised if their current company pulls out all the stops to keep them. This sort of happened recently to us, as we had another superstar interested in working with us, but his company, unbeknowst to him, was about to launch initiatives that addressed his major concerns. They made a compelling counter offer and he chose to stay, though it was not a decision made lightly. I won’t name names, but he’ll probably show his face in here at some point.

We are happy for him, as it is a good deal, but we are also disappointed because finding good talent is very difficult and costly. I’ve heard it said that it can cost up to a year of a developer’s salary to locate a good one. There is the cost in spending the time and resources to locate someone compounded by the opportunity cost of not having the developer currently plugging away at projects and providing value.

So in that vein, Jon put a job posting on his blog and we are still looking for one or more solid consultants/developers to help keep an eye on me.

So if you are interested, or know someone you can whole-heartedly recommend, please send me a resume (phil at veloc-it.net).

For those of you who have sent me resumes in the past, I apologize if I haven’t responded. We have started to put every resume in our internal Groove workspace so we don’t lose track of people. It’s been difficult keeping up with everything.