It's about making it clear what you want as an employer and hiring fairly. Employers should decide on whatever (legal) requirements they want candidates to have

It's about making it clear what you want as an employer and hiring fairly. Employers should decide on whatever (legal) requirements they want candidates to have and then hire the first person who comes into the funnel who meets those requirements, allowing for tiebreakers. At most places that aren't doing groundbreaking work this will just be N years of professional development experience and being comfortable with X and Y technologies. If you want to be more complex you can create a rubric including years of experience, the score on a take-home project, GitHub activity or anything else. It takes a strong hiring team to do it this way, knowing what they want and making decisions based on rules they've set for themselves. Weak teams will go by gut feelings, ego, random quiz questions, stuff like that. Put it this way, they say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it to someone else. You said you can evaluate programming strength within an hour. Could you teach someone else, or put down in writing, how to do that consistently? That's what I'm saying hiring teams should do.