Whiteboard interviews measure stress performance and familiarity with competitive programming problems. They don't measure if you can actually build software. The industry is finally admitting this and changing how it evaluates engineers.
Whiteboard Interviews Measure The Wrong Thing
Writing code on a whiteboard under time pressure while someone watches is a specific skill. It correlates weakly with job performance. There's research on this. There are also countless stories of engineers who fail interviews at FAANG companies and then build great things elsewhere. The signaling is backwards.
Take-Home Assessments Get Closer
Let someone work in their own environment with access to documentation and tools. The work they produce is actually representative of the work they'd do on your team. The problems are time, evaluation consistency, and the risk that someone gets help they shouldn't. A good take-home doesn't exceed 2-3 hours, uses a clear rubric so everyone gets scored the same way, and focuses on a real problem with design decisions that matter.
Work Samples Are The Most Honest Test
Ask candidates to do something small that represents the actual job. Code review a pull request and discuss the findings. Debug a realistic codebase and explain what's wrong. Write a design document for a stated problem. This directly measures skills they'll use every day. The predictive validity is actually strong because you're testing the actual work, not a proxy for it.
Structured Behavioural Interviews With Consistency
STAR format questions about situations they've faced, tasks they took on, actions they took, results they got. Ask everyone the same questions to make scoring comparable. Focus on competencies that actually matter for the role. Technical leadership, cross-functional collaboration, handling disagreement, delivering in ambiguity. Train interviewers to ask good follow-up questions and calibrate their scoring to a rubric. Without that, every interviewer is basically guessing.
The best hiring processes combine these. Work sample plus behavioral interview, plus a conversation about how they approach problems. You're not looking for perfect, you're looking for people who can learn and contribute. That's a different bar and a better signal.