Using Statistics to Hire Developers

The Interview

I was interviewing a developer for a mid level position today and he turned out to be not up to scratch. The CV looked pretty good, but when I dug in with some fundamental Java questions he was found wanting. Not an unusual occurrence, but still costly. It took 30 minutes of my time, his time and a number of other people were involved to get the process to this stage.

I wondered if there might be a way to remove some of the candidate CVs from the batch before we do the costly part of interviewing.

Spam or Ham

Classifying CVs could be considered like the Spam/Ham problem. Apache SpamAssassin is a good example of a spam classifier. It can probably be made to classify CVs - or at least try, but it is written in C, I think and that is not my thing any more. This looks interesting, so I forked it, converted it to eclipse and started the process of making it build with Maven.

First I am going to try this out with spam and ham email, then will try it for other text passages. Maybe CVs if I can get my hands on some. I am not expecting a huge amount of success with this, but I want to try out some Machine Learning techniques in my work. I did this last year and don't want to let all that hard work be for nothing.

Java Interview Questions

If you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of an interview for a Java job take the time to lookup 'Java Interview Questions'. Spending an hour refreshing (or learning) these top items are likely to add considerable polish to your presentation. You can be good, but interviewers have a hard time seeing through rusty skills in an hour.

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