>>Rather than trying to read subjective, noisy signals from in-person interviews, give candidates a small battery of work-sample tests.
I tell people the same thing, but the typical response is "that just discriminates against people who have families and other obligations and can't set aside 10-20 hours on evenings and weekends".
Mostly right. The better way to think of it is that you have a bucket of hours from which to draw phone screens, in-person interviews, and challenges. If you do no challenges today, you shouldn't expand the bucket of hours to accommodate them, but rather take offsets from other activities.
Phone screens are particularly useless and a good place to scavenge hours from.
I tell people the same thing, but the typical response is "that just discriminates against people who have families and other obligations and can't set aside 10-20 hours on evenings and weekends".