In many companies, developers are hired by line managers and HR people. But that’s like having no musicians sitting on the panel at an audition. HR people just don’t have the skills to detect real developers. Steve Hanov visualized the difference very nicely in his blog post.

If you have checked out our recruiting process, you know that we only invite people for interviews who have demonstrated an acceptable level of programming skills in solving the bowling game assignment (found here). But it doesn’t stop there. We have a rigorously standardize process that consist of at least three formal interviews. One of which is where two developers work with you on your code. And as writing code is the most important thing you’ll be doing here as a developer, that is also the most important interview. Our rules are simple.

1. All interviewers independently rate their experience as either a no, maybe, yes or clear yes.
2. We never hire somebody who gets a “no” from anybody on the team.
3. At least one person has to be clearly enthusiastic about the guy or gal to become a member of the team.
4. The result of the coding interview has to be a “clear yes”

That’s why resumes are not very interesting for us and why we can totally do without cover letters.