Remove your SCM system from your job postings

Most job postings will list one or more source code management (SCM) tools in their laundry list of required skills and buzzwords. This seems to both be unnecessary and also to miss the point. As an employer, your concern shouldn't be whether or not your candidate is intimately familiar with subversion, git, perforce, starteam, mercurial, CVS, sourcesafe, or whatever system your code happens to reside within at this point in time. Why not? Because it just doesn't matter and it doesn't help you distinguish good candidates from bad. This in my mind seems akin to asking potential postal employees "Do you have experience driving from the right hand side of a boxy little truck?". It's just not something that's going to be a stumbling block. If you can drive, you'll get the hang of the postal delivery truck soon enough. It's the same with SCM. If you have worked successfully on a few sizeable projects in one or two of them, you'll be fine. I've never heard this story: "Oh yeah, we hired this woman Sandra and she wrote this fantastic code for us, but she just could not figure out how to commit it to subversion, so we had to let her go." It's just not going to be the issue. Well, what is going to be the issue?

In this context, it's more important to see if the candidate understands branch and release organization and management as generic principles. When and how should the code be branched? What steps do you take when it's time to ship a release? When a bug needs to get fixed against an old version of the product, how does that work with SCM? These types of questions are OK sanity checks to spend 2 minutes on in an interview, but they don't need to be on your job posting.

Now, here's what I see missing that seems in my mind much more likely to actually cause you problems down the road. Does your candidate understand software packaging, distribution, installation, and upgrade? Do they understand the principles of package management systems like RPM or DEB, and the complexities around dependency management, upgrade, and rollback? Do they understand how to package and ship (or not) third party libraries? These questions may be more or less relevant based on the deployment model you use (web vs. bundled vs. embedded, etc). However, for lots of projects, they are key and lots of companies are clearly in the dark here.

So the summary: don't bother listing a specific SCM as a requirement in your job posting. Instead, briefly interview your candidates on general SCM methods and principles. And in addition to that, given your deployment model(s) find out how much your candidate knows about packaging and installation.