[hocuspocus]

Employed candidates have no problem taking a day off (or two when they live far) for a full round of on-site interviews.

Personally I'd much rather work on a 4~5 hours long assignment in my own time. Sadly in my experience, companies that use this approach use it as a way to eliminate phone screenings rather than to make the in person interviews more relevant.

[EliRivers]

"Employed candidates have no problem taking a day off (or two when they live far) for a full round of on-site interviews."

Oh. I thought I was an employed candidate who had a problem taking a day or two off for an interview. I must have imagined it.

[kasey_junk]

He meant, it is a common phenomenon in our industry to have full or multi-day interviews and people don't say "you'll only be able to hire unemployed people for that".

Programming assignments are usually more flexible for employed people than interview days.

But they aren't a panacea. They are hard to design and if you haven't switched to an objective rubric for measuring them, they can be just as subjective as interviews.

That said, I whole heartily agree with using programing projects instead of interviews.