Passionately Curious

What do you really look at when you're hiring people?

Does your team fall into the various mental traps that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his latest book, Blink? I.e., do you look for people who fit your conscious and/or unconscious biases? Wouldn't it help if, like the symphony committees, we only hired people based on their ability to code where we could not see them?

Does your team fall into the hiring hubris fallacy that Joel talked about recently? Is this just another example of the Lake Wobegon Effect where organizations are trying to make themselves feel better? Wouldn't it help if we only hired people we thought were better than us?

Does your team fall into the Certification Fallacy -- believing that a certificate means that a person is good/qualified/etc.? Do you only look for resumes that have the ridiculous laundry lists of keywords that the HR people can put into their filtering software? Wouldn't it help if we actually looked at what the actual work that a person has produced?

Or, is your team tragically hip and hires open-source commit sluts? Wouldn't it help if we actually spent some time working with people and the software that they've worked on?

When it all comes down to it, aren't we really looking for how we connect our true passionate curiosity with each other?