At my old company, we never did take home assignments or whiteboard interviews. We just sat candidates down and pair programmed with them for a couple hours on whatever we were working on at the time. We paid them the same hourly rate we were making, (but didn't charge the clients for it).
If the candidate obviously didn't know what they were doing, we ended it early. Usually you knew within 15 minutes.
One candidate hated the interview process, and walked out. One candidate, likely a future business leader, argued vociferously for a higher hourly rate during the interview, and later with the founder.
But I would describe our success rate for finding good programmers who were easy to work with as "extremely high", and our rate for false positives as "I can't remember ever having one in about 4 years of working there".
The overhead for the engineering team to run these was not zero, and not everybody enjoyed doing it. But some people did, so we had them do it more often. I have no idea why this isn't a more common practice, I would recommend it to anybody.
If the candidate obviously didn't know what they were doing, we ended it early. Usually you knew within 15 minutes.
One candidate hated the interview process, and walked out. One candidate, likely a future business leader, argued vociferously for a higher hourly rate during the interview, and later with the founder.
But I would describe our success rate for finding good programmers who were easy to work with as "extremely high", and our rate for false positives as "I can't remember ever having one in about 4 years of working there".
The overhead for the engineering team to run these was not zero, and not everybody enjoyed doing it. But some people did, so we had them do it more often. I have no idea why this isn't a more common practice, I would recommend it to anybody.