You're on the right track. At my job, we use Vagrant and VMWare Fusion to load up our dev environments. I'm thinking it might be trivial (or at least, less complicated) to simply give the VM to my candidate... The problem is that sometimes they don't have VMWare or VirtualBox. Ideally, I'd just write a single script that installs everything for them, so all they have to do is write code...
Maybe for the upcoming hack week...