The Perl Shop provides contract and permanent placement of Perl developers. Our placement services are exclusively for positions where knowledge of Perl is the primary skill required.

Should I hire?

Most organizations should be considering outsourcing as their first option. Only when both your organization (technical and project management) and process (tools and procedures) is mature, and your labor needs stable and predictable, should you consider permanent hiring.

Outsourcing costs more per hour, but less overall if your organization is not ready. A cheap contractor with insufficient managerial oversight and weak process will cost you more in the long run.

If your labor needs are not stable or predictably growing, even having to fire a contractor can be painful. A project outsourcing company, like The Perl Shop, is well prepared for this and will professionally conclude a contract in an orderly fashion whenever you request it.

* senior devs only

Although there is a lot of infrastructure (recruiters, job ad sites) pushing companies towards permanent or contract hires, as you can see, that approach should be the exception, not the rule, if you objectively assess your situation.

Tell us about your staffing needs.

Why Use Us?

Simply put, we have domain expertise. Perl isn’t just one of the technologies we deal with. It is the main technology, and the only technology we recruit for.

We’ll make sure that candidates are technically qualified for your needs, and you can focus on assessing their soft-skills, like cultural fit.

We won’t waste your time with unqualified candidates

Perl is used in a wide range of fields from web development to biotech to DevOps and we understand the differences. If you are looking for a back-end web developer, we won’t send you a candidate that has mostly worked in DevOps, even if they’ve mentioned web frameworks on their resume.

We’ll uncover relevant candidates that keyword matching will miss

If you tell us you are looking for a Perl developer to work on a Dancer application with a RoseDB ORM, and most of the work will be enhancing the back-end business logic, we’ll know that a suitable developer should have strong experience with ORMs, with a high preference for RoseDB, but skills with other web frameworks, like Mojolicious, are highly transferable and equivalent.

Our process

We start with a phone screen, as most recruiters will, but that’s where the similarities end. Qualifying candidates will then be invited to take our programming test (see below). Finally, candidates that do suitably well on the programming test will be evaluated in a peer coding session to validate that they authored the their test submission, to get a better sense for their skill level, and to see how they interact with others.

Objective assessment

Occasionally recruiters will use tests to qualify candidates, but they are usually multiple-choice tests designed to quickly assess a candidate’s general Perl knowledge. They are optimized for ease of grading by recruiters with low domain expertise.

We’ve found tests to be a proven way to qualify candidates, but in our case we use a test that emulates a real-world programming task. We can tailor the test to assess the specific skills you are looking for.

A well administered test will not only filter out the unqualified candidates, but also surface candidates that have not articulated their skills well on their resume. Not everyone is good at selling their abilities on a resume, and if you put too much weight on it, you’ll miss some valuable candidates.

Any candidate we supply will come with a report that assesses their test submission and performance in the peer coding session. The report is more objective than what you normally get from an interview, and provides a consistent way to compare candidates you are considering.

Your candidates or ours.

We source candidates through several partners that are well connected in the Perl community, in addition to our own, continuous advertising and networking.

We can also provide all of the candidate assessment services described above on candidates sourced through your advertising or non-domain expert recruiters.

Tell us about your staffing needs.