CV vetting
If a CV made it through my first phase of vetting (the blatant lies, and nonsense) and not ended in the bin, I'd send the applicant a 10 question form, asking for a return by next day.
I found that asking really simple questions (for hiring a field installation/support engineer) would weed out a lot of the chaff.
"What is the difference between a hub, a switch, and a router?" If you'd get back a block of text copy-pasted from a Cisco website, it was one candidate fewer to invite to the office.
When invited to the office, I'd give a cup of coffee (or tea), two PCs, and a clean 2950, and a subnet to configure written on the whiteboard. "Make them talk over the switch, on VLAN 100."
Then walk out and give them half an hour.
I don't want to sound "smart" here. But after a couple of dozen duds wasting my time, not knowing the basics of much more complex stuff we were doing, this approach really worked, and we ended up with an great "flying squad" of engineers that could work out things by themselves without much, if any, remote support needed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
