I see a lot of drawbacks to the consulting project: 1) Anti-moonlighting clauses 2) Time commitment from both parties 3) Tax/thought overhead to signing agre

I see a lot of drawbacks to the consulting project: 1) Anti-moonlighting clauses 2) Time commitment from both parties 3) Tax/thought overhead to signing agreements and getting paid. This way I'm a 1099 everywhere I interview. There's a reason I'm not an independent consultant full-time. 4) Different challenges. How do you objectively, fairly evaluate candidates when they're given a different issue to fix or different feature to implement? But I agree that work-samples are essential to good hiring. A staged, small-challenge approach (like Thomas Ptacek / Matasano use) seems better to me from the standpoint of an interviewee for a few reasons: 1) Less overall time commitment. 2) Fail-fast. If I blow the first hour(s?) long screen, I'm done. No weeks of work involved. 3) Consistent, fair evaluation. Presumably a set of "canned" challenges are used and the time taken and quality of output can be evaluated directly against the performance of others.