In the past, we hired devs who could code well when given well defined problems, like you'd get in an interview process. But they struggled with the actual dev

In the past, we hired devs who could code well when given well defined problems, like you'd get in an interview process. But they struggled with the actual development work after we hired them. We put some effort into figuring out the disconnect. Turns out, one of the most important skills in our organization is being able to break down a business level description of the work to be done and turn it into discrete development steps. Also, need to have a good grasp of data modeling and how to change the model to support changes in the work requests. So, those are the first two things we test. We give the candidate a description of the work to be done and ask them to interact with it. What questions would you ask the client and how would you break this down into stories/issues? Then, we give the schema of the existing database and ask them to modify it so the new schema supports the work requested. Still very software development oriented, just not coding. We have more in-depth coding exercises later in the process. I realize in some orgs, there would be a project manager or product owner of some type who would break that work down. And we have team leads who do the majority of that work. But for our org, devs who couldn't do this struggled to perform well in the development work too. So it became a skill that correlated to being able to succeed after hire.