Finding a new job isn't part of your current job. It is over and above. If you aren't willing to put in a few hours after work for something not related to your job, why are you even bothering to go looking for a new job anyway? Are you job hunting on your current employer's time?

Almost too obvious solution: do an initial phone chat to filter qualified candidates into a small pool and then pay your final round of candidates a nice rate to complete a take home project. Bonus points if you can make it something that you can actually use at your company.

This is a terrible solution at many levels. Paying someone who isn't on your payroll (yet) needs a lot of bureacracy on both sides (e.g. taxes).

And even if it's paid, it's still a not-insignificant time investment for the applicant. They're probably applying for several gigs and take home assignments would quickly turn into a full time job, and filing the tax paperwork could take more time than the coding.

And finally, assigning a job that would actually get used at a company pushes up the complexity level, the need to understand the context. This would also make me very suspicious about the motives of the company.

In my company, we give a "fizzbuzz" level assignment on the whiteboard (or their own laptop if they prefer). The purpose is to weed out the applicants who can't code at all (makes a surprisingly large portion of applicants). Additionally, we've noticed that the ones who are good programmers will ace these tests.

I don't think that whiteboard assignments or takehome work is a good way to assess how good a programmer is. A 15-30 minute smoke test with a binary result (the applicant can or can not code at all) is good to filter out bad applicants but not to distinguish good from excellent.

I don't see how paying them for their time fixes the work/life balance and already have another job combo?

For one, a potential employee may find it worthwhile to take an unpaid personal day to complete the challenge of they are compensated.

It also shows the company is semi interested and not just meeting the consideration requirements before selecting an already chosen candidate.

The take home exam is quite a bit more of an efficient filter than a blanket phone screen. Anything less than a 20 minute call isn't going to tell me much.

Personally I think it'd be fine to e-mail back and say "sorry I don't have time to work on this with my current schedule, could I do an in-person interview instead?" That's me though, I would hope the rest of the industry is willing to work with people. Even just the response to the e-mail would tell me that they're competent enough to know their time management and that they have limited bandwidth. At some point you need to make a sacrifice of time though. Even if your hotel and plane ticket are being paid for to fly out to the place of business, you need to take that time off to go in for the interview.

I'd prefer to do a lot of that at home personally.

> Personally I think it'd be fine to e-mail back and say "sorry I don't have time to work on this with my current schedule, could I do an in-person interview instead?"

What happens instead is that you just don't ever hear back from candidate.

Sure, but there's only so much responsibility one can take for this stuff. Presumably there are other candidates willing to respond.