Assessing candidates when you don't have the skills

I believe firmly in only hiring real quality talent. This doesn't mean a 
team of divas; teamwork is also a quality, as is the ability to deliver 
working code even though you may not be the best at inventing same code. 
This means that hiring at our company is a process of many steps (resume 
screen; written test; phone screen; second phone screen; one big or two 
sizable on-site interviews, ...)

However, this all assumes that we know how to judge the quality of those 
we screen. What if you're looking for a totally different kind of skill, 
so you don't know how to screen for that? How do you ensure solid 
quality within that field? Here is a thought experiment:

Say, for example, that I wanted to hire someone to translate my product 
to Chinese. The product is fairly technical, and it's already generally 
i18n aware, so this has more to do with proper use of the Chinese 
language than anything technical. Unforunately, for this example, I 
don't know Chinese, nor does anyone else at the company. So... how would 
we screen candidates to find the top quality talent, who knows how to 
efficiently translate English UI, documentation and verbiage into 
appropriate Chinese customs, with particular attention to high polish?

Ideally, you'd know someone who's already good -- but in this case, I 
don't. Or you'd go for someone that someone you trust recommends highly 
-- but in this case, I'm an early adopter; none of my retrograde 
stick-in-the-mud friends have done this yet. How do you seed the web of 
trust?

I would loathe going with agencies, because for the agencies we've used, 
almost all the candidates have been barely literate, and they've been 
still billed as "the best we have." (There have been exceptions, of 
course) Agencies seem to run a cursory keyword match, maybe check a 
reference, and then throw what they have at you, hoping something sticks 
so they can collect their commission. There might be an agent or two who 
actually spend the time to develop quality candidates and only place 
them at properly aligned companies -- if so, I'd like to hear about 
those, too :-)

For the problem at hand: Maybe you can hear from a friend of a friend 
about some agency that specializes in Chinese translators, and is 
supposed to have good candidate selection and high standards, and you 
can go from there. That seems kind-of tentative, though.

So... any ideas?

Cheers,

          / h+


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