[hyperchase]

The best company I ever worked for did a two hour pair programming session on a simple rails app (since they were a rails shop) with every candidate that got passed the "chat over coffee" stage. You'd get to see the kind of code the candidates write and how they work through problems, how they work with another developer, and get a really good overall sense of how they would work as part of the team.

[dubroff]

I like pair programming sessions a lot because both the candidate and the employer are investing an equal amount of time. While the intention behind take-home projects is good, the result is often that the candidate invests several hours into a project just to be quickly passed over by the employer.