As NuSoft continues to grow, it sounds like we're looking more and more into hiring people right out of college. Most of our current hires are experienced hires, and the process is different. You can't really expect someone out of college to have a ton of knowledge about what types of things you're doing. In college, the solutions to your coding problems are predetermined. In reality, that's not the case. Because of this, you have to interview the two different groups differently.

Anyway, Joe Kraus has a nice post about how you can tell if someone has passion for what they’re doing, regardless of your experience level. He asks three questions:

1. Do you have a blog? I do, obviously. Better question - why do (don't) you blog?

2. What's your homepage? This is a good question, but flawed a little with today's tools. I don't have my own custom homepage - I start out with a blank page because it's faster. I use Maxthon, and I use the short cuts where, for example, I can type "g asp.net" and do a search on google for asp.net. I don't need a custom homepage to navigate quickly to what I use. So the question isn't quite right, but it will elicit the information you want.

3. Do you contribute to an open source project? I don't, but it's still a good question. I read somewhere else about asking people what piece of software they've written that they use on a daily basis. Passionate developers always seem to write their own tools to make life easier. Personally, I wrote my own blogging tool because I couldn't find a tool that did two things: Produced good XHTML, and allowed me to post to multiple blogs at the same time - regardless of blogging software. As for open source projects? Well, I have plans to release my blogging tool to the open source community - I just haven't gotten around to it yet!

These questions are good ones that can be combined with some more technical questions to get a more overall feel of how well a candidate will fit into your culture, which is really what you're looking for in a new hire.