| We do almost exactly this at my company and it works wonders. Presentations are not about powerpoint. They are about geeks geeking out with other geeks. Every talented programmer I know has a pet project he'd love to talk your ear off about. The presentations we solicit are often little more than the candidate opening up a text editor and showing off some code, and fielding tame questions from the other developers. As for the contract position, everyone that is motivated to switch jobs, or to come work for us, can find time to do the really simple tasks we split off for $100/hr. It is also made clear that if you've made it to the contract, we are extremely interested in hiring you, or else we wouldn't give you access to the repo or the team. The gig is to give both sides a chance to see what working on something real feels like. We have found only excellent developers after this process. That said, it probably doesn't scale very well, and I'm sure we've unfairly weeded out many good devs. Also, we skip a lot of the BS if there someone comes highly recommended from current employees or other partners we trust. |