[gtolle]

At my startup, I've had some success hiring mobile devs through "audition programming" on Google Hangout.

I create a "real-world-lite" task like "connect to this simple JSON API I built and implement a recursive product category browser on top of it". I've done this task myself already with a timer and am confident that it will take about an hour to implement. Then I ask the candidate to share their screen and implement it in Xcode while I watch. As they develop, I can get a sense for how they attack problems (quick and dirty, slow and methodical, stack overflow copying, etc), and afterwards I can ask questions about their thought process.

If they did well in the first one, we block out a second one for another hour, and a third for another hour after that, each one testing different skills.

This avoids the time imbalance inherent in take-home projects, because I'm spending just as much time as they are. And it avoids the painful "implement a red-black tree" whiteboard questions by focusing on real-world work in their own dev environment. It also means I have a decent sense of their skills before I ever invite them to an on-site interview.