I have worked on a team trying to improve our hiring process before and there are lots of things we tried to balance such as the candidate's time, our interview

I have worked on a team trying to improve our hiring process before and there are lots of things we tried to balance such as the candidate's time, our interviewing engineers time, and trying to be thorough and fair. We obviously want to hire capable engineers but need to be mindful that senior engineers understandably don't want to have to jump through lots of hoops! We found that doing a simple coding exercise (not leetcode) together is one of the best stages we have. It gives us a great insight into how they approach a problem, if they think about things before jumping in, and how they communicate. All those things are missed for a take home assignment.