I am supposed to hire a Senior Dev for my startup but I'm kinda confused as to what should I do to make sure someone is good enough. People often write 5-8+ years of experience yet turnout to be fakers and I really can't afford that right now. Any tips on hiring somone senior or more experienced than I am..

📌

Not an expert, but it makes sense to have a clear picture of what you want first.

Do you really *care* about how many years of experience the person has? The amount of code quantity and quality is going to vary a lot by company. One person could have worked at a startup for 10 months and been responsible for refactoring an entire codebase, delivering features, troubleshooting deployment issues, building out MVPs, writing acceptance criteria and interfacing with clients while another could work at a company for multiple years and rarely contribute to the codebase.

What other qualities do you value? Do you want leadership ability? Mentorship ability? The ability to come up with designs and execute them or the ability to take a wireframe and match it? Do you want someone who can run point on a feature with little input? Do you want someone who can collaborate with others to compromise on a path forward? Do you want someone who will raise concerns or who will shrug and do what told?

@AmyShackles I don't mind the number of years they have written on their resume or whatever. I'm basically looking for someone who has experience in Ecommerce websites. Their job would mostly be to go through the code we have written and give feedback on it and provide suggestions on how it can be improved and also code some complex stuff every once in a while. It's not a permanent position but rather a part time consultant role.

@AtuM
That’s a bad advice.
These compagnies are only interested in you accepting ASAP their candidate so they get paied.
They will :
• Alter candidate CV to match your offer. (Even invent shit)
• Make false tests / claims
• Will try you to get the worst person they have in stock first
These compagnies are the WORST. All of them. There are no such thing as a “good” company in this field.

Like Amy mentioned, just write it down what the job should be the person have to do. And ask the people how would they solve the problem, did they had work on similar stuff before. There is not much sense to look at years of experience, I mean I have x years of experience in PHP, but havent touched it for a while, so probably I would be a failure compared to someone who have 6 months but focuses on it right now. Look on what theyre doing now, and how it looks like, dont go in the stuff like what is he wearing or how he's linked in profile looks like.

Take the one that can invert a binary tree. That's the real shit there.

If you have (or are) a good dev already, you can just do casual interviews and hire the least-dicky candidate that you enjoyed a conversation about your product and coding in general with.
In most legislations you can negotiate a probation period with full pay but no legal period of notice. So you can fire the candidate instantly (and the candidate can just go too) inside that period if it turns out to be a con artist.

If there are too much candidates, do additional prefiltering by CV plausibility and criteria mismatch.
If a CV is too perfect to be true, it most likely isn't and you can spare both you some time by not sending out an interview invitation.