Technical interviews are awful. They are grueling and they are prone to major false signals in both directions. However, I'm not sure this is the way to go eith

Technical interviews are awful. They are grueling and they are prone to major false signals in both directions. However, I'm not sure this is the way to go either. Personally, I'd love for a "common form" application where you could do a timed take home coding exercise, in absence of that, why not just talk through code with an interviewee. You don't need to watch them code, if you are a good judge of technical skill, you should be able to tell just by the way that a candidate talks you through tradeoffs, refactorings, etc whether than can code or not in a way that nothing else shows. So you really need someone to write tests for their moon rover they just made you to see that they can actually write unit specs, or would you rather talk through testing tradeoffs, when they use mocks or not, what issues they've encountered with long running test suites or flickering tests, how they test the frontend, what their thoughts are on strict versus loose TDD, etc. Get your candidate excited and let them ramble and you'll learn far more than any contrived coding exercise, even if it isn't a whiteboard interview.