One thing I personally do with candidates nowadays is just...talk. Ask them general stuff I'm genuinely interested for their opinion but that would very quickl

One thing I personally do with candidates nowadays is just...talk. Ask them general stuff I'm genuinely interested for their opinion but that would very quickly display the proficiency of the person without ever coding any line. Question such as, for a web development job: 1) favorite way to manage git history 2) what do they like/dislike about different CSS authoring solutions 3) how did he manage localization on his previous projects 4) candidate's opinions on different frameworks/libraries 5) candidate's debugging approaches 6) opinions on latest updates to the ecmascript And I can go on and on. As you simply chat and exchange ideas it is so blatantly obvious who's able and who's not. There are no right/wrong answers and it's totally fine to not have experience or knowledge about this or that but in one hour you can touch so many topics about your current projects and candidate's past that you can indirectly understand the level of seniority and proficiency of the candidate. And anyway, all of this is useless. Because the most brilliant and knowledgeable candidate could spend all his day playing videogames and pretending to work anyway, so why would I put so much emphasis on those skills/knowledge rather than the individual/professional I have on the other side of the screen which is way more relevant? I need people I can *trust* as coworkers. People I can assign tasks and know they will be done or that the candidate will communicate. I don't need puzzle solvers. I really don't. I couldn't care less. At the end of the day you need to optimize the interview for what you need from your colleagues. I need trust, reliability, communication, professionalism, effort. I can sense those from chatting and I can have a good idea. But by having you implement Levehnstein's distance I just have no intel.