[viraptor]

Phone interview - 1h during work hours. On-site interview - ~3h total, but probably a whole day off work. Test - ~1h at any time you choose.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. They would spend just as many hours, at a more inconvenient time of day without the test. I did the task myself to a level I'd expect at the time to make sure it does not take "many hours". If that simple task would take people many hours, then I hope they didn't apply... (or they would probably fail very soon if hired at all)

[throw_away_777]

The candidate gets no benefit from doing your take home test. In an interview the candidate learns something about the company. Also the ~1h requirement just isn't realistic if you give an open-ended test - you penalize the people who actually spend 1h and reward those who spend more time.

[dpark]

As the other commenter pointed out, you don't control how many hours a candidate spends on the assignment. All you see is the end result, and the guy who spends 8 hours will generally end up with a more impressive result than the candidate who spends 1 hour, and this reflects time spent far more than candidate quality. If you give an "open ended" assignment, you are encouraging candidates to spend a ton of time and then lie and claim they spent very little time, because that looks impressive.

Do you really think "the 1 person who made a proper package, a short .rst install & use documentation, and included crazy unicode test cases" spent only an hour?