tl;dr: Essentially agreeing with soham. I don't believe that there is any ideal process. A lot of it comes down to having good hiring managers that know how to

tl;dr: Essentially agreeing with soham. I don't believe that there is any ideal process. A lot of it comes down to having good hiring managers that know how to evaluate a candidate based on their alignment to the company goals and the role they are being hired for. Reid Hoffman wrote a great piece recently calling for a change in the company/employee relationship from "join our family" to "help us while improving your skills". He said that a standard interview question at LinkedIn is (paraphrasing) "What would be your ideal role after you leave LinkedIn?" The point of the question is to A) identify candidates who are motivated to grow their talents, and B) communicate to the candidate that it's OK to imagine quitting someday. That's an example of what LinkedIn believes works, but it might not be appropriate for another company, say that wants to hire programmers into more of a stable career pipeline. Similarly, some shops might be highly specialized in certain roles/technologies, making deep-dive technical interviews more valuable than at a company that needs bright generalists to solve poorly defined problems. There can be no one-size-fits-all solution. One thing that's worked well for me is to have candidates meet a significant number of the peers they will be working with. Another is to ask a quick "weeder" tech question and then an open-ended architecture design question (i.e. Describe how you would build the Facebook activity feed). Checking references is also valuable. But these are just ideas and they may not make sense (or be possible) in every situation.