I require them because candidates lie, not always intentionally. The unfortunate reality is that it can be really tough to fire low-performers. I NEED to know

I require them because candidates lie, not always intentionally. The unfortunate reality is that it can be really tough to fire low-performers. I NEED to know that a candidate can do the work. We go out of our way to make our ask reasonable, relevant to the role, not spec-work, not time consuming, and well defined. It's not uncommon for us to learn that the candidate can't actually do what their resume says they can or for the candidate to learn that they grossly overestimate their own skills. I recently talked to a Python/JS expert that led a project at a major agency to scrape a network of websites, find and extract specific data, and deliver game changing competitive intelligence. The candidate ended up admitting that their role was limited to copying and pasting a pre-built code snippet into the dev tools console and that they couldn't actually read or write any code. The proof is in the coding challenge.