Because so many good people don’t actually know how to write a decent resume, we basically take everyone that submits a resume that’s absent of spelling errors, has decent grammar, and some reasonable list of skills that we need. Then, one of us will do a phone interview to see if we want to spend the time on an FTF interview. When the candidate arrives, they are given a simple test in the areas that we are trying to hire a person for. These are simple 6 or 7 question tests that anyone with more than a year’s experience should be able to answer. We immediately review the test and, based on their answers, decide if we want to do a technical interview. If they don’t, the Dev Manager (who monitored the test, BTW) thanks them for coming, informs them that we are evaluating other candidates, and politely shows them the door. If they do pass the test, then the rest of us (3 of us evaluate the answers on the test (NOT multiple choice, BTW)) walk into the conference room and begin a deeper technical interview.

Using these tactics has saved us a HUGE number of man hours in the interview process, keeps us for being subject to “Bait’n'Switch” tactics, and has kept us from missing the occasion “diamond in the rough” due to poor resume writing skills.

“a document must contain exactly one root element”

I thought it had more than one root element. Turned out it had zero root elements because the file was empty.

Once I deleted all of the empty XML files, it worked out great. Thanks for your post!

And on a side note, I can only smile over the (which has a sophisticated expression language) – because that is the understatement of the year ;o)