[pp13]

What type of candidate are you looking for? Obviously recent graduates will not have that much coding experience and reading comprehension.

Are you looking for someone to write new libraries from scratch? Who can implement new algorithms and data structures from nothing. Someone who can write new protocols and publish it to the team?

Are you looking for someone who can read your code base? Just fix bugs?

This one problem I keep seeing, many software companies don't know what to look for. Everyone wants that "smart and gets things done", but do you what things need to be done?

[aplusbi]

I work for a financial software company and we have a lot of projects so it depends, really. Recently we've been looking for some frontend Javascript developers the project I work on. The interviews we've been conducting have reflected that - mostly questions on things like JQuery/Moo Tools, having the candidate code stuff using AJAX, etc. "Real world" stuff in other words.

We often hire C++/C#/Python/Perl/Ruby/Objective-C/Java/etc (seriously, we use all those languages) to work on existing code bases. We work on Linux, VMS, Windows, iOS, and BlackBerry. We have plenty of "glue" code, frontend code and code that needs to deal with large amounts of data.

We don't expect recent graduates to have much coding experience. You seem to think that we have some strict checklist which is not the case at all. I really don't know where you got this idea. My initial comment was simply meant to answer the OPs question. I don't always ask those questions, I weight many things in my decision (including whether I think I conducted the interview well - sometimes it's clear that I've failed to properly describe the problem) and discuss the candidate with other people who have also interviewed them.