btw, I’d love to hear your thoughts on phone screens — we’ve been going back-and-forth about whether we can/should do technical phone screens (i.e., additional screen over and above what the recruiter does).

Make sure your criteria is really your criteria. In other words, be careful about inflating your requirements just because you’ve got a lot of applicants.

Ask yourself questions such as these:

– Do I really need a Microsoft Word doc? Or would a text file work just fine? (P.S. if you give a text file a “.doc” extension, many people won’t even notice it’s not a Word file. Word will happily convert it.)

– Are the qualities, preferences, non-technical skills essential for this position? Or are some of them just indicators I like to see? (A friend was asked about blogging and public speaking in what was ostensibly a tech screening.)

– Does the position require that technical skill? Or do I think that might be useful sometime in the future? (I once interviewed for a Java position where they were doing Cobol work. They just hoped to do Java work in the future. The funny thing is, the job listing didn’t mention Cobol, and I didn’t have any Cobol experience.) Or would a skill with a similar technology and an aptitude for learning do just as well? (I’ve seen job postings that required experience with particular versions of particular tools or technologies.)

– Are you being too specific about “the way you do work.” Asking for experience with Agile or Iterative-Incremental lifecycles is one thing. Rejecting someone with XP experience because your organization does Scrum is another.

The problem with inflating your “requirements” goes beyond missing out on qualified candidates, it can result in a pool of less qualified candidates for the job, though they’re better qualified at covering all the bases on their resume. And if your “requirements” don’t really match the job, it may result in an unhappy hire that doesn’t stick around very long.

My point is that even when it’s a “hiring manager’s market,” the hiring manager still needs to give the same level of attention to the process.