OK, let’s see how you would handle this situation: we had 2 candidates for a shoestring startup project, one male, one female. On paper, both had a similar experience base. Both the owner and myself (tech manager) were biased IN FAVOR OF THE WOMAN, who was quite confident of her programming skill level (the owner is not technical at all). I talked to both on the phone, but I met neither candidate face-to-face, so the personal attributes of either one did not enter into the evaluation. I despise so-called canned tech interview questions about technical details (trivial pursuit IT-style), as I find them to be useless in evaluating talent, so I devised a short but very specific programming trial that was intimately related to the job requirement and would definitively reveal if someone could actually do the job.
She returned about 50% of of the task, which was utterly non-functional, then threw in the towel. He completed the task to my complete satisfaction.
For a small company with no slack and no ability to cultivate talent over time, who would you have hired, and why?