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No, they don't. You can't make sure if a person can solve the problems they're supposed to and if they'll fit in to your team with such practices.

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Have conversations not interviews

Interviews I do now are more like having a conversation with the person. I mostly want to know what they are doing right now. How much do they understand about it etc. Then we'll move on to understanding what they understand about technologies they use and their opinions about that. Later I'll introduce some problems that we solved in the product I'm working on currently and get their thoughts on how they'd have approached it and how they'd have solved it. By this point I'd have a fair idea if they're a good fit for the team.

Later I'll enquire about their aspirations and ambitions and talk about our team and company.

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Now the process explained above takes about 90 minutes for me. So it's better to do it with really promising candidates. Here's a process I was following in my previous company.

• Application stage - Everybody applying for the job are supposed to fill up a form. It has some simple questions to evaluate what the candidate is doing right now. It is interesting to note that we filtered out 90% of candidates in this round
• Phone interview - We'll do a 5 minute call with the candidate to tell them that they are in the process and what are the next steps.
• Coding challenge - We send a problem to the candidate and they should give us a working solution in 1 weeks time. This helps us understand how hands-on the candidate is, If they write clean code etc
• Pairing round - We invite the candidate to our office and gives them a problem to solve. We'll pair with them while they're solving the problem and have conversations as I explained earlier.

Following such a process helped us concentrate our time and efforts on right candidates