I’ve had to interview hundreds and learned a lot of lessons. With that, here’s my best advice to anyone else who wants hire a Rails developer:

If you plan to hire a local candidate do not use 37signals job board. I’ve used it twice, it’s pricey, and I never got a single resume from a local candidate. Our office is in a major American city. On the other hand I got a great resume from monster which turned into us hiring a great programmer. To be fair, his was the only resume with rails experience, but we got a good number of decent resumes from monster of people that had a genuine interest in rails, but had not used it professionally.

Look for open source contributions. Being intimate with the open source workings of the Rails community is crucial. Open Source contributions such as releasing a Rails plugin, or fixing bugs on projects like Beast, or Rails itself, demonstrates exposure to other Rails code bases.

A university degree is not important. I hate to say it-I’m personally a graduate from Canada’s highly-regarded Math/CS program at Waterloo-but several of the best Rails developers I know didn’t study computer science at all. Hire perpetually. You’ll find that I always have an open Rails developer position, because when demand outstrips supply, you should hire when you can.

Have a company Rails blog with useful, meaningful posts (like our Email Veracity post which made it to del.icio.us/popular) to spread awareness and goodwill.

Regarding holes in proficiency… web development is increasingly vertically integrated. In Java and .NET worlds, its quite customary to have front end, business tier, and DBAs all separated. The highly integrated Rails philosophy–convention over configuration, and all that–requires a top to bottom perspective. Rails is not that different from any other MVC framework. Anyone who has used Struts+Hibernate in the Java World can start working on Rails easily. I think working with Rails and being a good Ruby developer are different things. Finding a good Ruby developer is harder. A good Ruby developer with decipher the internals of the Rails implementation , understand the philosophy , and extend it, the average one will just follow the book.

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