[xxbondsxx]

Doesn't that heavily bias towards candidates who have used jQuery before and/or built a product gallery before?

Skewing interview performance based on some specific previous experience might be what you want if you expect your candidates to hit the ground running, but might not be the best to gauge long-term performance.

[nfriedly]

This was back in the day when everyone used jQuery for everything, and the company was only looking for experienced people, so a candidate who hadn't used jQuery before probably wouldn't have been a good match for the position anyways. I don't think a single candidate had that issue though.

As far as the product gallery goes, I wasn't looking for a pixel-perfect product. Just spit out a bit of html and matching CSS that look vaguely like the mockup. The mockup images had things like the hex values of the colors written on the image to make that part easy.

Basically, it was trying to focus on things that would be the main part of the candidate's job there. The folks that we did hire all did well on both that interview and long-term at the company.