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How to recruit External consultants

Traditional software interviews will not work out for recruiting external consultants. 'Tell about yourself' is a stupid question. The client, company and the external consultant, nont is going to meet in person.

Rate yourself is meaningless. Asking technical skills, assessment everything is useless.

Assume that an external consultant cleared all traditional interviews, but unable to complete the work, he may not understand the business model. His internet connection is servered.

So all the time and resource spent to conduct traditional interview are waste.

First thing to check with a consultant is his internet connection. His computer infrastructure to chat both voice and text.

He should be able to converse with client or at least converse with local business person or to whom he is reporting within India.

He should be able to fit into any business model quickly. Like, shopping cart, CRM, CMS, Event Management, LMS, classifieds, integrating mashups, payment gateways, and anything specific to client requirement.

Traditional interviews can not assess the ability to fit into any business model.

Create a simulation of client's web application in test server. As the external consultant to fix a bug which is related to core business model of the application. If no bugs to fix, create it. No front end bugs like javascript validation or CSS fix. Core business model bug. Do not provide any documents or supportive material to understand the project.

Let the external consultant walk through the code, have reverse engineering. If he/she fixes the bug, sign the contract, otherwise skip him. Interview should be simulation of real work or real work.

For fresh projects needed to be start from scratch, deploy the existing consultants who have already proved.

Do no take the risk of engaging new consultants in new project. Let the new consultants start with bug fixing or adding new functionality to existing application or join a project in halfway and complete it.