[robjs]

The most important thing for you to identify is what the key characteristics of the person that you're trying to hire are -- can you teach them the technology if they don't know it, but it's key that they're able to interact with your customers in a helpful manner? Maybe it'd be OK to be a bit gruff if they were able to handle all your DevOps tasks and take those off your plate. Figure that out - and then bias for those characteristics.

Even then, you absolutely cannot distill how successful an employee someone will be down to a single document, but equally, you can't interview everyone - so there's some level of pragmatism that you have to exercise to be able determine who to interview. My experience here is that the filter criteria doesn't have to be the typical screening that a bunch of us probably are frustrated by (e.g., "does the resumé mention Python? No. Route it to /dev/null").

I've tried the following.

1. I'll filter by folks that I think have demonstrated some interesting commitment in their journey to where they are. For example, interesting side projects along with their professional experience, or a non-traditional route to their role (e.g., didn't attend college for the "expected" subject). My experience here has been that these folks often have different insights that have correlated to being easy to work with, and fruitful for the teams that I've engaged with.

2. I'll try and determine folks that are able to communicate in their resumé some particular outcome that shows that they had a wider perspective than their immediate role. This tended to me to show that the person was able to think a bit wider than the task that was on their plate, which again has correlated with good teammates to me.