I wish it was that simple :(

As someone who has hired a lot of devs over the years (almost exclusively for our offshore team in India, but sometimes in the EU), I can tell you that the number of candidates who embellish and down right lie about their capabilities and past experience is shocking.

Truth is, I hate both sides of the interview divide, as interviewer and interviewee - it's a horrible, inefficient, flawed process regardless which side you're on, and nobody has the answers.

If Indian offshoring teams constantly lie about their credentials way more than local, I would think having different interview processes for different sources of candidates would be a better option than a process for the lowest common denominator.

Yes, I do agree to a point.

People outside of India often embellish or exaggerate too though, even if not close to the degree that I've experienced in India (disclaimer: this is my own opinion based on my own experiences over 10 years or so. Obviously India has a lot of great, honest Engineers, our organisation never sees them though, largely because we don't pay well enough).

A good reputation with solid references that are checked from real engineers and managers that you actually delivered a good product seems like it would suffice to override the straight up lying, to me. Is that not the case?

References are an excellent way to confirm someone that someone did actually work at a particular place in a particular role and that they are not a total asshole. Beyond that, unless you know the reference well, I think they can be unreliably.

The reference knows the candidate and likely feels a much closer connection with them than they do with you. Assuming the candidate isn't an asshole, they will want to help them out by giving them a good recommendation. If the candidate was let go due to downsizing or such, the reference may even feel pressure to help the candidate find a new job.

So it's a great data point to have and as you say, it can help weed out the straight up liars.

But any 2 given candidates with 5 years at Acme Inc are not interchangeable. Some candidates are just better at programming (or some subset of it) than others, and I think employers try to find ways to predict that at interviews.

One technique I have found works is to do incorporate your own open source code into your work. Then when they want to see samples you have commercial quality code that isn't company property.