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As somebody who has been on the hiring side (not the hiring-manager, just the technical person assigned with deciding whether someone looks like they are what we want or not), I've often just been given a CV after they've been 'pre-screened' by HR. The issue is I'm usually given a bunch of CVs, and I need to fit this in to whatever other work I've got going on (probably too much already which is why we are hiring). I can arrange interviews, but that probably means I'll need to stay after hours (a lot of people can't just take an hour off in the afternoon to go for an interview), so it's in my best interests to filter down that list. Plus arranging interviews won't just happen the next day - although we need someone yesterday, just deciding who we want to hire is going to take another few weeks. If I can see that you've got some open source projects or a blog or anything to show how you work, it really helps to make you stand out from everyone else, because most people don't have anything to show. If I had a candidate that looked good, I wouldn't throw them away because they didn't have any side-projects, but if I've got two candidates who both look good on paper, that probably would be the deciding factor. So yes, hiring someone to build some side-projects for you might be beneficial. At the very least you could use it as a management side-project :D Another place I worked at gave a small programming assignment (build something to import a CSV into a database). It was pretty simple, and would take you no more than two hours, but it was rather good to see how people work and whether they could follow instructions (>50% of candidates ignored the "write tests" line). This was used to screen people for an interview, during which we would ask them questions about it. |