[kasey_junk]

It is the central problem in the software development community right now that we have no good objective way to measure software quality. Without that measure we can't judge software methodologies (thus the TDD flame wars) and we can't judge software developers (thus the interview flame wars).

So in each case we come up with proxies for this measure. Having done the interview side of the fence a lot, my strong intuition is that nearly everything people try to measure in developer acquisition strategies either don't correlate or negatively correlate to hiring good developers.

At this point, the only advice I give people about this is figure out a repeatable, measurable process for your organization and measure every single filter you use during hiring. Test the measures on just hired applicants, applicants a few months out, and applicants a few years out. It is time consuming and fraught with problems but there is no magic bullet out of this morass.