yes, the goal is standardization of interviews, not hiring the best candidate, but it's also about signalling the cleverness of the interviewer and the company.

yes, the goal is standardization of interviews, not hiring the best candidate, but it's also about signalling the cleverness of the interviewer and the company. if you're actually clever, it will be evident during the interview without having to plan for it with a pre-determined interview puzzle. but your "zero risk" assessment is a common but unproven justification of such hiring practices. with good management, you can easily bound the cost of a bad hire to a few (tens of) thousands of dollars. it's hard to estimate the benefit of a good hire since that's an alternate reality not taken, but it's probably many, many times higher than the cost of a bad hire: opportunity cost of losing a good hire >>> realized cost of a bad hire (the probability of a bad hire is higher than of missing out on a good hire however, so you'd need real numbers to estimate the relative costs)