Hiring Rails full-time Rails developers is hard. Surging demand. You will likely fight other companies for every recruit. Freelance consulting rates are going through the roof.
If you plan to hire a local candidate do not use 37signals job board. I've used it twice, it's pricey, and I never got a single resume from a local candidate. Our office is in a major American city. On the other hand I got a great resume from monster which turned into us hiring a great programmer. To be fair, his was the only resume with rails experience, but we got a good number of decent resumes from monster of people that had a genuine interest in rails, but had not used it professionally.
A personal Rails blog is required. Every Rails developer should have a blog to engage with the community. On a related note, I've often asked candidates to list their favorite Rails blogs or even show me their newsreader. They should know most of the top Rails blogs and who's behind them.
Be wary of holes in proficiency. Rails developers should be fearless. Its reasonable to expect them to have a command of everything from database indices to cross-platform JavaScript. (Bonus points if they are handy in Photoshop and Illustrator.)
If they are using Mephisto or Typo then they've been exposed to an established rails code base and have successfully deployed it and even customized it. As my company does social media software, engaging in the blogosphere is good experience. How else can you really learn the nuances of FeedBurner and Technorati, etc., if you haven't had a blog? Lastly there's the psychological effect of identifying yourself publicly as a Rails developer. That's a commitment, and addresses my Tip #3 about finding candidates that have self-selected to do Rails.
Regarding holes in proficiency... web development is increasingly vertically integrated. In Java and .NET worlds, its quite customary to have front end, business tier, and DBAs all separated. The highly integrated Rails philosophy--convention over configuration, and all that--requires a top to bottom perspective. Rails is not that different from any other MVC framework. Anyone who has used Struts+Hibernate in the Java World can start working on Rails easily. I think working with Rails and being a good Ruby developer are different things. Finding a good Ruby developer is harder. A good Ruby developer with decipher the internals of the Rails implementation , understand the philosophy , and extend it, the average one will just follow the book.
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