It's actually more like asking a candidate airplane pilot to fly in a simulator. I'm personally a huge fan of interview questions that require candidates to do

It's actually more like asking a candidate airplane pilot to fly in a simulator. I'm personally a huge fan of interview questions that require candidates to do tasks that are as close as possible to what they'll actually need to do on the job. For devs this means coding, designing etc. For testers this means creating test cases and for a UI designer it means doing UI design. If someone made me interview an accountant I'd have them do some actual case questions for accounting. I wouldn't be able to tell if they did them particularly well but that's a whole other issue and is probably why no one has asked me to interview any accountants. Like many other folks that interview using this strategy I've come to it after seeing how many people have a great resume but are completely unable to do the actual work. This is often true even for people that pass reference checks with flying colors. After getting burned a few times you realize the benefits of getting people to demonstrate their abilities before hiring them. The counter point to getting developers to code during an interview (and presumably to accountants doing accounting problems in an interview) usually takes a form like "I can't write code in an interview setting b/c X, Y and Z but I'm a great coder under normal conditions". I'm sure this is true for some people and it is unfortunate that those high quality people miss out on jobs they are qualified for. It's also a loss for you as a hiring manager. But as a hiring manager you're better off with an interview process that mistakenly screens out some good people if it ensures fewer poor hires that you ultimately have to fire. A poor hire is very expensive in terms of time, team morale, money etc.