A wise friend once told me that an entrepreneur starting a new business should spend 1/3 of his time communicating his vision both inside and outside the company, 1/3 of his time on raising money, and 1/3 of his time finding and hiring the talent needed to make his company successful.
Whenever you set out to hire someone, you should treat it like a project. First define a spec. What will this person be asked to do? What skills does he/she need to be successful? And what minimum level of experience and education is required? You should also think about what kinds of industry segments have good examples of this kind of person. For example, electronic design engineers for aviation might come from the medical field since many characteristics are similar in terms of the highly regulated development and testing environment, along with the high level of configuration management required. Your human resources department can help with defining target compensation.
After you define what kind of person you are looking for, the next step is defining who should interview the candidates and what you want them to look for. I have found that a meeting of who will be interviewing helps coordinate the interviews for maximum probing of qualifications and chemistry.
Oh yes, chemistry. It is very important that any new hire fit into the group and work with them. I have seen very well-qualified engineers who could not get along with some people in an established group and ultimately quit. To avoid that, it is important to select some interviewers to probe how well the candidate has worked with others and the reasons for job changes. Other interviewers should be selected to probe the job skills you are looking for.
After narrowing down your choice to a few candidates, don't forget to do reference checks. If anyone in your company has worked with this person before, seek their opinion about the candidate. Recommendations (or cautions) from others not on the candidate's reference list are far more valuable than the carefully selected names the candidate hands you. When you are checking references, listen between the lines—few people will tell you outright untruths, even while perhaps shading the truth a bit for a friend.
Hiring is hard work. It is easy to have an interview that is more of a social visit. It is up to you to challenge your interviewers to ask probing, hard questions. Remember, each person you hire costs a lot of time and energy. You don't want to waste that by having to re-do the hiring a year later.
-Don Burtis