I think this is obvious, but look at the alternatives. * Resumes can be exaggerated, falsified, or perhaps more often often leave out important details or rele

I think this is obvious, but look at the alternatives. * Resumes can be exaggerated, falsified, or perhaps more often often leave out important details or relevant experience. Reviewers often also put unconscious emphasis on formatting or style (I had one colleague that I swear would accept anything in Computer Modern). * Take-home projects (if not carefully designed) can be a considerable time sink and reviewers may be biased toward particular coding styles or languages. * Prior employers are often not allowed to provide meaningful references, and even when able to, won't often have the time or motive to do so. * Referrals will be biased towards the friends of your current workforce, making it hard to improve the diversity of your workforce, and are a pool that will become exhausted as you scale or if your employees stick around. * Behavioral interview questions are biased towards candidates that know to prepare for an even more contrived corpus of questions with even less bearing on day-to-day job performance. * Candidates may not have prior code that their are able to share; certainly most employers make that difficult or impossible. Expecting side projects or open source contributions biases towards candidates that have means or desire to program outside of work. I think it's ridiculous to think that a programmer should be hired without any part of the process evaluating their programming ability. The key is to do this while minimizing stress for the candidate. Explain the format of the interviews up front. Tell them about the people they are interviewing with. Let them have breaks. Help them through tricky parts if you have to. Avoid things that aren't realistic (whiteboard coding) but don't shy away from things that are (whiteboard a system design). If leetcode doesn't represent what you do at work, don't make them do it.