This is what we do. We created a small programming test that's very representative of 80% of our work. Candidates are asked to only spend 2 hours on it. If they can follow simple instructions and write a reasonable implementation we'll have a face-to-face.
This saves us a huge amount of time and I don't feel it's overly burdensome on candidates.
This saves us a huge amount of time and I don't feel it's overly burdensome on candidates.