Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office?
Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help.
I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees.
A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc).
There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).
Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help.
I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees.
A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc).
There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).