It's unduly burdensome to require the candidate to complete a take-home assignment before even having a interview. Simply first interview the candidate (require

It's unduly burdensome to require the candidate to complete a take-home assignment before even having a interview. Simply first interview the candidate (requires an roughly equal investment in time) and then give take-home for the promising candidates. To compensate for the candidates time you obviously should compensate them. To do otherwise is to create a heavily unbalanced situation for the candidate who might have to complete multiple of these take-home assignments (as you're interviewing multiple candidates they should be interviewing multiple companies).