How can I assess who to hire?

Your CV doesn't necessarily reflect your drive to do well. It gives you a timeline and it gives you maybe some brand names of universities or companies and sort of vaguely what somebody's responsibilities are, but it's not necessarily a tell-all, and in often cases can be misleading.

I think what I try and focus on is how engaged with trying this thing is this person? How motivated are they to give this a go and really embrace the opportunities that this job offers? And what are the things that they feel that they can really bring from whatever experience they have, which I guess, in theory, that's what you'd hope everyone is doing, but I guess what I mean by that is I'm not looking for a university degree, I'm not looking for sort of lots of certificates or lots of awards. Although those things are very commendable and demonstrate a lot of hard work in their own way, that's not the sole thing that's going to indicate to me that somebody is potentially a really great candidate.

I think it's perfectly possible for people of varying ages and backgrounds to come at, especially in a job like programming, to come at it from so many different ways and it would be shortsighted to not explore all those different routes in when you're hiring somebody.