derek.colley (7/26/2012)

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My advice would be to hire a company to find a DBA for you.

Sorry Abel but this is god-awful advice. I recently got involved in a round of recruitment for a new DBA and the companies (agencies) we contacted just could not come up with the goods. When I asked around at the UK User Group in Manchester a few weeks ago, everyone agreed, agencies just aren't the right way to find a good DBA.

What you need to do is leverage the existing talent in your team to write an award-winning job description, and price it up appropriately - don't be cheap, aim between the mid-range and top pay for the sector. I don't know where you're based, but in London a DBA will earn £35-£50k and a senior DBA £45-£65k. If I were recruiting a senior DBA in London I would pitch the job at £50k and I'd expect to be negotiating upwards with the candidate. Evangelists will earn even more through consultancy. Contract rates fluctuate between £280-£400 per day.

The job description will need to be very specific in the areas in which you wish the applicant to be competent, but broad enough to cover multiple subject areas. It's certainly not a good idea to go Googling for a standard job spec.

Bad example:

* The applicant must be competent with SSRS, SSAS, SSIS.

Good example:

* The applicant must have knowledge and experience building SSIS workflows, creating DTS / SSIS packages, and deploying these to a production environment. In addition, the candidate must have experience in designing and building OLAP cubes, an excellent knowledge of data warehousing, and experience in creating custom reports in Visual Studio. Ideally the candidate will hold a Microsoft BI-related professional qualification.