A blogger (I forget who) said to reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads to a lot of unnecessary interviews. Some gentle pressure on your phone screeners to reject marginal candidates works very well. One way to do this is to bring the p…
This is a good tip. My employer is in the process of tightening this up as well. One colleague noted a correlation between people who are able to solve a phone screen problem inefficiently as frequently performing poorly when they make it to on site interviews. So raise the bar for what solutions are deemed good enough to proceed to on sites. Some good candidates may be excluded but the ratio of good candidates making it to on sites should increase.