It's the only way, IMO. I am someone who tends to drift every few years from manager to individual contributor. Here's my take: As an engineer, I refuse to d

It's the only way, IMO. I am someone who tends to drift every few years from manager to individual contributor. Here's my take: As an engineer, I refuse to do tests and take home projects for interviews unless the company also offers to pay me for my time and the problem seems immediately relevant to the domain. There are few other fields one would ask to to perform your work product for them before hiring, and few that it would matter (being a chef is an example that comes to mind, but there are others I'm sure). As a manager, solving gotcha problems is rarely indicative of someone who will perform good at a development job. Give me someone who shows understanding of my stack via experience and understanding my business. These efforts to screen at this level by untrained people tells me the hiring manager is too disconnected from his hiring process, or just too lazy. All I want my HR team to do is scan resumes for at least some relevant experience before passing them on to me, and I provide them with plenty of examples, both on and off stack sometimes, of what that might look like. If I was going to suggest a take home project or a quiz app like this, I would already have dedicated enough of my time into vetting that person that I'd probably just invite them for an interview instead and do a live coding exercise with them.