One aspect of "selling the candidates" that can be overlooked is the tech interview. There's a big opportunity to demonstrate your own/your team's technical excellence as a selling point.
What this is not, is skewering someone on "j=j++ in a loop" trick questions, or dryly sacrificing them on the algorithmic altar. Programming is supposed to be interesting, so it should be interesting to dive into fundamentals, language issues, library specifics or whatever, and keep drilling to the edge of the candidate's knowledge, and beyond.
The hope is, the good candidates get grilled a little, and walk out thinking "I could learn something here."
Yeah, 'cause language issues and library specifics are far more interesting than dry algorithms.
This seems bass-ackwards. Library specifics, and to a certain degree language issues, are exceedingly amenable to recourse to documentation. An understanding of algorithms, less so.
I don't mean to knock algo questions, especially not complexity and data structures.
I do think language and library fundamentals get overlooked, for the very reasons you mention: yes you can google pass-by-value and consult docs about a TreeSet ... but the good programmers don't, they already know when/how/why and don't forget it after a year of doing something else.
For sufficiently fundamental fundamentals, I'd agree. I'd certainly include pass-by-value vs. -reference vs. -name in that. I strongly dispute the notion that good programmers don't consult library docs. Library surface area is huge, particularly in batteries-included languages. One should know well the areas they use, but there will be plenty outside that, especially if they're moving between many languages.
What this is not, is skewering someone on "j=j++ in a loop" trick questions, or dryly sacrificing them on the algorithmic altar. Programming is supposed to be interesting, so it should be interesting to dive into fundamentals, language issues, library specifics or whatever, and keep drilling to the edge of the candidate's knowledge, and beyond.
The hope is, the good candidates get grilled a little, and walk out thinking "I could learn something here."