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I've said elsewhere on this thread, but my absolute favorite technical interview method is to set up a contract to pay the candidate to create a feature or fix a bug on your codebase, and have it merge and work as expected.

It lets the candidate feel (literally) valued by your company, and you get to learn how they do the job you are hiring them to do.

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Agreed that this is a great approach, but the major downside is that you are limiting yourself to candidates who either:

a) have the time to do real work outside of their day job and aren't on a restrictive contract preventing them from moonlighting, or...

b) are currently unemployed

I was a college student at the time. I was long on money and short on cash. I was also far less experienced than I was so there were a lot of new things for me then, like those fascinating "callback" thingies I had to figure out.

Nowadays if I were given roughly the same assignment it would have taken me about 3-5 hours at best, which, given my graduated-and-employed hourly rate, is actually quite in line with what I was paid. So it paid as much as I would have charged for a Saturday hack.

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