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How much hiring and interviewing have you done? I've seen countless resumes with 25 years of stated glorious achievements, and they couldn't write a for loop.

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I've done quite a bit and have never had any difficulty sniffing out "gloss" with just a few minutes of questions over the phone using the applicant's resume as a starting point for the conversation.

When you're focused on system implementation, delivery and maintenance you can pick one of the past projects listed and start probing. It's not hard to quickly get a picture of what the candidate did and didn't do on the project and whether or not they're blowing smoke.

Exactly. Of course, we do have to be a bit careful how we ask about past projects, to avoid the appearance of being exposed to IP, but it's doable. We can also just talk about hypothetical design problems (and they can learn about us based on the questions we ask, even if we're not doing a collaborative exercise). But no whiteboard CS101 coding negging.

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