After a basic call to make sure that the culture fit is ok and to learn some background about someone, I believe the best way is to assign a small (4-10 hour),

After a basic call to make sure that the culture fit is ok and to learn some background about someone, I believe the best way is to assign a small (4-10 hour), realistic, paid (market rate) task for the interviewee to work on. I don't think that programming on a whiteboard is a good way to evaluate how someone works, and many of the problems don't reflect the real world. Interviews without programming can also favour someone with good charisma and ignore programming skills. Instead, by providing a realistic task for someone to work on, a company can better gauge how a person works, what solution they come to, etc. The interviewee is also at home and in a comfortable environment versus one with time pressure. I've had two contracting jobs that evaluated this way, and both of the teams were nothing but joy to work with. In the first one, I was commissioned for 10 hours to evaluate an existing codebase, refactor a little bit, give input, etc. Their CTO agreed with my feedback and I was hired. In the other job, I was commissioned to layout their mobile application's view controller and navigation architecture. Once again, my solution was reasonable and I was hired. Neither of these tasks are unnecessarily algorithmic, tricky, etc. They're simply real world problems and in both cases, even if I wasn't a good fit, the company would have (hopefully) benefitted in some way or another.