Thought I would add my own thoughts to the difficulty here and just talk about the process I brought into the last place I worked at. I came in as a Director at a time when the company had a...let's say not too great set of developers overall from a skill level perspective (the company thought they were amazing! That's maybe a story for another time). I'm proud of the process I introduced there because it led to my meeting and befriending some top tier gentlemen. While it may not work for everyone (and I understand it perhaps weeds out some candidates) it seemed to do all right. Here it is, for anyone to steal if you so feel it useful:
* Candidate applies
* Within 24 hours, the candidate has a personal reply from our in-house recruiter. That E-mail explains the entire interview process and sets up a brief 15-20 min phone screen with the candidate.
1)
The phone screen is mostly nothing more than a brief "psychopath test" (is this person nice to talk to or are they rude or condescending?). The recruiter talks to them about their own goals, aspirations - if we approached them, we skip the "why do you want to work here" part otherwise we ask them what appealed to them.
2) The candidate is given a take-home assignment (which has no time limit but has been vetted against internal staff to take no more than really about an hour), with a note attached that says "Hey, you're likely a great and talented candidate and I'm well aware that you may be thinking that this is a waste of your valuable time. What I can assure you is that
a) I'm only doing this because our industry is a sewer ;), with no real standardized screenings
b) As discussed in the first E-mail, there are no further technical "screenings" coming forward - if we go to the next phase, we'll just discuss your approach to the assignment for a bit and then it's "getting to know you" time.
Internally, this technical assignment is not one where two reviewers can have different "reads"; there are things we're explicitly looking for to determine overall "level", mainly with readability, approach, things like that (as just one example, a senior level candidate will know about unit testing and show something along those lines in their solution).
3) Someone reviews the submission. We reply within 48 hours.
3a) If the candidate is a no fly we don't go forward, and tell them so. If the candidate asks why, I tell them explicitly what the assignment was looking for, provide links to get acquainted with those and encourage them to reapply at a later date (we hired someone who did exactly this - those are the kind of passionate ones you want to be working with).
3b) Candidate is a go-forward;
the next step of the interview is simply a discussion about "The Alliance" (Reid Hoffman, great book, at least the first half) of what they'd like to do with their career and whether the company can harmonize that into something both parties are happy with, and a getting to know the candidate a bit deeply. I told candidates explicitly at this point not to stress, as this wasn't an interrogation but simply us understanding that - to tie this back to the original posting - they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them.
Our hire quality sharply increased after that. I left the company a year and a half ago but that process is still in place, relatively unaltered. In fact, one person left the company, went to another company and basically "stole" that interviewing approach because he thought it was so good for finding people but also treating them with respect (which is critically important).
TL-DR; our industry, particularly around hiring, really sucks and it's an absolute crapshoot on both sides of the equation. It's sad and really depressing; I try not to spend too much time thinking about it and more time trying to mitigate it in my small corners of the world. =) I wish it were different.