When looking for candidates you often want to have people with direct experience

Question

When looking for candidates you often want to have people with direct experience with the technologies and platforms you are using today. However, that may not always be a possibility. The particular requirements may involve niche tech, outdated tech, or your team has already drained the local area of everyone with that particular tech (not everyone works in Silicon Valley, some of us work and live in some smaller metro area for reasons unrelated to the profession).

So often that can leave you with hiring people who are "off-platform" like Dot-Net people for a Java project, or Cobol programmers for an iPhone app (or vice versa). Or even just a language switch, from Visual Basic to Scala or JavaScript to C.

My question is what qualities, attributes, and experience would you look for as in interviewer to indicate that the candidate can successfully switch platforms or languages, and what are the indicators as to the level of success and timeframe.

Also, decent "war stories" related to this would get a solid upvote from me.

Explanation / Answer

As someone has has always been hired "off-platform" (to work with technologies I was not entirely familiar or had experience with), I can think of a few things:

Does the candidate have a history of working with various technologies?
Does the candidate seem passionate about programming in general and seems interested in learning to work with your platform?
Does he have experience with similar technologies? If he has developed programs similar to what you do with a different platform, the risk is low.
Has he researched a bit about the platform before being interviewed?
Can he answer generic programming questions?
Any programmer worth the title should be able to make the switch pretty easily (mastering the particularities of each languages takes time though) and should be up-to-speed quite fast.

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