Some of the best hiring strategy I've came across is indeed "test driving". Take a challenging problem your team has, slim it down and ask candidate to do some

Some of the best hiring strategy I've came across is indeed "test driving". Take a challenging problem your team has, slim it down and ask candidate to do some quick prototype during a weekend. No interviews, puzzles or whiteboarding :). If you were going to fly down a candidate on-site for a day of interviews instead, it's going to take same time anyway considering logistical effort on candidate's part. Test-driving, however, is unfortunately neither scalable nor "leak proof". As soon as one candidate gives away your test drive question, the next candidate could easily cheat away inflating their apparent awesomeness compared to other better candidates. However it would be incorrect to write down all whiteboarding interviews as "evil". Like any other interviewing techniques, it really depends on how you do it. A good whiteboarding question that allows candidate to use CS fundamentals to solve fairly non-trivial problem that you also needed to solve for your current work is a great question. There are 3 major reason why this doesn't work as expected at some large companies: 1. Interviewers can't think of good whiteboarding question and fall back to commonly asked popular puzzles. These interviewers are also often the ones who have one "favorite" question that they would ask everyone. This is absolutely #1 problem why whiteboarding interviews devolves in to secret puzzle marathon. The best questions that interviewer could ask are actually the ones that they needed to solve themselves as part of their work recently. This keeps questions relevant and refreshed regularly. It also allows to compare candidate with themselves and follow the philosophy of hiring people smarter than you. It's however hard because interviewers themselves needs to continue doing something interesting regularly. 2. Interviewers provide feedback to each other during the loop. It's not coincidence that if 1st interviewer gives "hire", all rest tend to do same at companies where there is no clear policy of not communicating feedback before end of the interview. 3. Interviewers don't follow up candidate response by extending question, building on to next level perhaps open ended scenario, asking auxiliary details such as test cases, complexity etc.