At big companies HR and legal will say you need a reproducible, auditable, objective and defined interview process or you open yourself to a whole host of lawsu

At big companies HR and legal will say you need a reproducible, auditable, objective and defined interview process or you open yourself to a whole host of lawsuits, and you will get lawsuits because there is blood to squeeze from that lawsuit cow. Also at large scale you cannot trust the entire corpus of employees since your are well beyond dunbars number, so the process is there to prevent cheater and nepotism clusters forming where random employees hire their incompetent drinking buddies or cousins after a single "lunch". That process works for small companies, and it's an advantage they should leverage, it does not work for the large ones. IMO you need work sample tests as a minimum, which means a coding assignment. Some people are great bullshitters at lunch.