So I'm leaving my job for a role at another company and before I leave I have one last task: I must hire a replacement for myself <gulp>. The reason for the <gulp> is that this is the last thing I will do for my team, and I really don't want to leave them with a dud as they are great bunch of guys.
As a team lead I've interviewed for developers before with mixed success - from my perspective recruitment seems really tough and it's not something you get to practice very often. However there are already some excellent posts on Stackoverflow on the subject of hiring pure developers. I've been through these and got some great tips on the technical side of the recruitment process.
The problem I'm facing is that the skills that I need for my job as a team lead are very different to those required for a developer. The successful person needs to be part man manager, part project manager, part problem-solver-in-chief, part agony-aunt. They've also got to be able to stand up in front of clients and management and give a good account of themselves.
So any thoughts, advice, shared experiences or pearls of wisdom on the subject of hiring a team lead would be greatly appreciated.
Suggestion: Jorge makes a great suggestion - get the team involved in the process. Get the candidate to sit down and talk to each team member and quiz them about what they working on, how they are going about doing it. As a nice twist we could get each team member to pose question/problem to the candidate about what they are working on.