[jaredklewis]

Seems like a nice approach. I've been through similar setups and I think there are still tradeoffs though. Step #3 is tricky as you need a task complex enough for the candidate to show their skills, but it has to fit within a few hours. Unrelated to interviewing, I routinely under or overestimate task size, so carving out just the right task can be difficult. New features and bugs often have unknown unknowns.

The "contrived" puzzles approach has the advantage that each candidate can be given (and thus evaluated on) the same task. The size and perquisite knowledge for the task can be well controlled and since the problem is not new to the interviewers, we know how to present it in an easily understandable way and help them if they get stuck.

I think another reason why the "general cognitive ability" approaches are popular is because employees (especially at small companies) need to be good at such a wide range of tasks that it is not realistic to evaluate even a fraction of them in the span of a few hours.

[im_down_w_otp]

I don't have any expectation they complete the task. That's not really the point, so time-bounding it isn't something I worry about. The point is that they're able to engage and contribute in some way: insightful feedback, mentoring, reintegrative learning, productive collaboration, etc. depending on the shape of role that's being hired for.

The tasks can be writing docs, writing requirements, writing property-based tests, writing CLI tools for developer ergonomics, formally modelling and verifying a scheduler, designing a DSL for safety-constraints or characterizing the electrical interfaces of a car's steering system. It's not entirely material what the tasks are. There will be opportunities in any of those to get good indicators of the important factors.

FWIW, the purported consistency of evaluating people using the same contrived task is fairly unlikely to be actually consistent, and even if it were, the value of what you can actually meaningfully derive from it is still deeply questionable all the same. As a result the reality is more likely that those situations are producing negative net benefit.