Me: I work from 9 to 6 in <some place>
Recruiter: OK, let's schedule an interview at 9 am in <somewhere very far from where I work or live>
Are you freaking kidding me? Not only are you asking me to go to a quite remote place for an interview but you are also asking me to do it during work time.
Let's see what's wrong with this. In the first place, this recruiter was the first contact that I had with that particular company and my first impression is that they don't listen to me or they don't give a rat's ass about my schedule. And that's the impression they give me while they are trying to seduce me to work for them, so how are things going to be if I accept and become their employee? "Stop saying that things are broken and keep typing monkey! Oh, and you have to work during the weekend or we won't meet our deadline". That's a dream job.
Lately IT recruiters are quite desperate, I'm suspecting they don't even do the buzz-word bingo any more, if the resume says "software" they send you the generic "We are a vibrant fast growing innovative company and you are just what we are looking for" Linkedin message. When you lookup what the company does you find out that they develop iPhone games and you are interested in scalability and performance, a perfect match indeed. They just contact people all the time, someone will finally manage to get the job and they'll get the bonus.
What I'm trying to say is: IT companies, your recruiting departments suck!
These are the things that annoyed me about interviews and recruiting processes that I went through:
Most developers you will try to hire are already working for other company, trying to schedule an interview between 9am and 6pm lowers your chances of even getting to that first interview (unless you are trying to hire desperate people at low wages). Stay until 7 or 8pm for interviews and take the Friday's afternoons off if you want.
You must have a technical test, anything, not necessarily a technology specific test, but you need something to see if a developer is smart or not. There are smart people that are bad developers but I've never seen a great developer that isn't smart.
Let the team be part of the process. Would you let developers choose the best candidate for a HR position? I guess the answer is no, so why are you letting HR people choose developers?! They can detect interest, curiosity maybe, but that can be faked. If you already have a good team they are the best at telling who is good and who is not that good. And don't send just "the team leader" to the interview, send the people who are going to be peers of the interviewee.
You need to have a better description of the job for the interviewee, a nice paragraph or two describing what they are building, which technologies are they using, what are their objectives, what are expecting from the candidate. Ask the development team to help you with this, believe me, they are interested in working with good people and they will be happy to help you (and if they are not, you have a bigger problem than recruiting good people).
Outsourcing recruiting is the worst thing you can possibly do. A recruiting consultant only wants to maximize their profit, so the only thing they care about is that you hire the guy, not if is a good candidate for the position. So you'll end up so so people that kind of had a nice resume and some words matched the job description you gave them.
