Your process seems equally flawed. Many excellent candidates have no open-source code, and if they show you any closed-source code that's an immediate signal against hiring them.

So now you've put candidates through a silly "live coding challenge" – offering an advantage to the sort of person who is chatty and communicative with strangers in a stressful environment and the expense of people who may be better engineers but slower to warm up.

I really wish folks would be way less dogmatic about this stuff. Every single time I see someone say "take-home exercises are bad", their proposed alternative is also critically flawed.