Oh man, I have so much to say here. But, programmers already hate white board tests. Hell, I think algorithmic tests are totally dumb.
When I'm building out a team of developers, I probably need 10-20% of people who are "algorithm ninjas". That is, their focus is on highly complex, single-node logic. Everyone else needs to think about systems, ticketing, bugfixes, writing up good documentation, talking to marketing, investigate that issue that maybe might be happening, etc.
Most of the job requires a smart, communicative person, who may or may not nail an algorithm question.
In fact, a good friend of mine is a super senior engineer at Google who keeps moving up their ranks running more and more systems there. However, he failed the Google interview 4 times. In fact, if he had failed his last time, he would have had a lifetime ban on interviewing there. He passed the last test because he bought some books and took a weeks vacation to read up on his old CS stuff.
He says he's never used any of those skills in his job.
I find that having a conversation about software engineering tells me boat loads about someone's level, passions, focus, and experience. Just ask "Have you ever used memcache before?" .... and even if the answer is no, describe it a little. Then let them discuss what they think about it and see if they understand and can share their pasts with different, maybe similar, systems.
Or hell, depending on whatever you want out of someone, find out if they are great at the thing you need.
Okay, I have to stop myself from ranting too much.