What many candidates don't realize is that the hiring manager has probably gone through 1,000 or more resumes from recruiters or retained search agencies, phone

What many candidates don't realize is that the hiring manager has probably gone through 1,000 or more resumes from recruiters or retained search agencies, phone screened 20-50, and interviewed 5-10 to fill one position. "Pay me to contract on probation," sounds as if it's low risk for everyone, but it has stalled the pipeline for new candidates. It's not a reasonable request. If it were, then it would be a "contract-to-hire" position, and advertised as such. I've walked candidates out because they've refused to whiteboard code. I'm very "hey, let's work out this problem together, and don't worry, I'm not going to compile the whiteboard, ha ha," so most people don't get too stressed out. If they do, that's where I step in and help them along, which is my job once they come on board as well, so they can get a feel for my style. It also helps separate the people with 10+ years of c, java, c#, and syntactically similar languages who can't differentiate between parens and braces, understand pointers, etc. The interview is where you can say,"would you do that differently if..." and see if the person has just had an interview brain fart or if they really don't know what they're talking about. I've had a few candidates over the past 15 years or so that would just refuse to write any code. Certainly, I made the mistake of asking if they wanted to do some problem solving at the whiteboard, but I was flummoxed when the first guy (back at Amazon when interviewing at Amazon was perceived to be like interviewing at Google today) just said,"No." And kept insisting. I'm a big believer in not wasting people's time, so I walked him out before he talked to the more senior people on the team, who were all working 24/7 to bring out (I think) auctions at the time. Looking back, it may not have been that big a waste of time. :-)