I have no side code projects to show you

If you are unwilling or don't have time to create a public code repo or your own blog/website, you should be willing to take a skill assessment test from the employer. If you aren't willing to do any of that, I don't know how you can expect an employer to gauge your skill. You can't just provide a reference and expect them to hire you just because someone vouches for you.

You may think it's unfair that you have to go out of your way to make yourself look good to an employer but...that's the way the world works. I think the misconception is that people think 'having a side project' means writing a prolific open source project. You can spend 1 hour per week on coding small programs and have a great GitHub profile.

I own the book "Pragmatic Programmer", a widely respected book about general programming principles. The bit about its authors:

"Andy Hunt is an avid woodworker and musician, but, curiously, he is more in demand as a consultant. He has worked in telecommunications, banking, financial services, and utilities, as well as in more exotic fields, such as medical imaging, graphic arts, and Internet services. (...)"

"Dave Thomas likes to fly single-engine airplanes and pays for his habit by finding elegant solutions to difficult problems, consulting in areas as diverse as aerospace, banking, financial services, telecommunications, travel and transport, and the Internet.(...)"

Isn't tunnel vision focus on programming a bit limiting ? What about a different perspective provided by different experiences and skills ?

A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing - attributed to Archilochus

"(Isaiah) Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson" (Wikipedia)

I think modern society and job market places too big an emphasis on hedgehogs. While backend programming is my profession, I feel more of a fox than a hedgehog. It works well for hobbies, but not really for jobs as currently available. For example ladies tend to compliment me I have a nice voice. I also like books, fantasy and science fiction, and prefer short stories to novels. So I can connect the dots and... record some audio books. I look for old short stories no longer covered by copyright, and intend to record them as "audiobooks". For instance about a village fool who became a werewolf. Another example: I like animals, I'm precise, patient and have an analytical mind. Anwer: Origami. Another example: I can't draw much (I really tried with Gimp and some hand drawing... admittedly, without a good teacher), but I'm somehow attracted to visual arts. As mentioned, I'm analytical, and I'm not too bad at math. Answer: Vector graphics, .svg, Inkscape, writing images in vim. It takes some introspection and observation, but you can figure out what new hobby would give you satisfaction. If you have many interests, try to think what they have in common, or how you could possibly connect them.

Same for regular expressions. Once you know the syntax, they're pretty easy to understand. It just takes practice.

The issue is I'm usually given a bunch of CVs, and I need to fit this in to whatever other work I've got going on (probably too much already which is why we are hiring). I can arrange interviews, but that probably means I'll need to stay after hours (a lot of people can't just take an hour off in the afternoon to go for an interview), so it's in my best interests to filter down that list. Plus arranging interviews won't just happen the next day - although we need someone yesterday, just deciding who we want to hire is going to take another few weeks.

If I can see that you've got some open source projects or a blog or anything to show how you work, it really helps to make you stand out from everyone else, because most people don't have anything to show. If I had a candidate that looked good, I wouldn't throw them away because they didn't have any side-projects, but if I've got two candidates who both look good on paper, that probably would be the deciding factor.

So yes, hiring someone to build some side-projects for you might be beneficial. At the very least you could use it as a management side-project :D

Another place I worked at gave a small programming assignment (build something to import a CSV into a database). It was pretty simple, and would take you no more than two hours, but it was rather good to see how people work and whether they could follow instructions (>50% of candidates ignored the "write tests" line). This was used to screen people for an interview, during which we would ask them questions about it.