Search the Community

This isn't really a "programming question", I'd just like some advice really. I have been asked to write a paper by my boss on how we can go about recruiting for our developer roles people who (most likely) are not developers and will not have had any development experience of any kind. The reason for this, is that we have an external recruitment ban within our organisation (which sucks, but there is nothing I can do about it). We have about 20 developer jobs within our team. I work for a government organisation that has thousands of jobs for various purposes such as Finance, Statistics, Contracts - I'm not really sure what else, it's such a massive organisation - but nearly all the IT is outsourced to contractors apart from our little team. Any recruitment we do, they must already be a civil servant. So if they happen to love a bit of web development in their spare time then fantastic, but realistically, they probably won't. So how do you identify if they "have what it takes" to become a developer? Are there any official aptitude tests they can take that will show they are of the right mindset - ha - is there even a right mindset?! Other areas of our organisation use MS Excel a lot. Maybe there is some way of testing their VBA ability which would determine if they'd make a kick-ass programer or not?? I am open to all ideas here!!!