If you're already happy with your current job, and we can't convince you that our company is potentially a much better opportunity for you, then this is working as intended.
Interviews are expensive for the company too, so it only makes sense to invest time in someone who really is excited about switching.
Wanting me to jump through a bunch of performative hoops makes me assume you are in the "call you on the day of your daughters birth" camp.
I mean in the article you say "The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job." the times when this has been true of me has been times when I do not have a job. If I am being headhunted for a job and I am already in a good job, I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where the job being offered would be so enticing that I would be happy to make a significant investment of my time although I might do it grudgingly if the offer is good enough.
When I took the job at a small agency I'm in now I had stopped a consultant task that had run out of funding. I was in a hiring process with four other companies, the small company in the interview asked me how much I wanted I told them my price they said "that's a lot but we expected it would be something like that so it's ok" and then they said something that really cemented my interest in working there than any of the other places that I was interviewing with - they said "we generally have a coding task to do but in your case I think we can skip that".
thank you for saving 4-6 hours out of my week! My family thanks you too!
In fact now that I think of it this testing is another reason why I give people a significant raise as a requirement for moving from my current job. I am earning pretty high up for my market, the market is like many tech places a sellers market. When recruiters ask me to interview with the companies they're selling I name a 18% increase of my current wage and equivalent perks as a requirement to consider moving. Maybe I would only want 10% if I knew that trying for the job wouldn't require me doing a bunch of unpaid work.
Is this necessarily the case? The Clippers had to bend over backwards to get Kawaii Leonard on their team. They almost certainly would never have gotten an NBA Finals MVP if their philosophy was only go after people who were already excited.
The point is there some tradeoff in the design space. It's nice to have people who are excited to work for you, but chances are the superstars that will take your team to the next level, already have a dozen suitors. Kawaii Leonard isn't doing a six hour take home tests.
I'd suggest that maybe Firebase's experience here is not representative. It was one of the hottest startups in the Valley at the time. So maybe it could put up a lot of onerous requirements and still have talented engineers beating down the doors. If you're the Lakers, Lebron James comes to you. But for the 99% of hiring managers that are at the equivalent of the Clippers, maybe the same approach doesn't work.
I'm not against projects in concept and I've never complained about them to my point of contact, but they make the process slower (your process takes about twice as much of my time as everyone else's) and less exciting. Every other step of the recruiting process is really fun - talking to people about their company and the work they do, but a project is just homework that I have to do alone after work or on the weekend. I've really liked some companies that gave me a project, but I struggled to find time and then I got to the offer stage much faster with other companies that I also liked, at which point its hard to find the motivation to complete the project knowing that it isn't even the final step.
While you say you never lost a candidate due to the project, I would challenge you to consider whether you lost candidates due to the perception (fair or not) that your process was less enjoyable and more time-consuming than your competitors' and so candidates received and accepted other offers first.
"We don't want the best if they are happy in their current job".
The unasked question is where you believe the engineers are who can make your project a success? Are they out looking for work? Or are they happily ensconced in other work?
There was a prevailing belief, at least a number of years back, that the best engineers were not found on the open market, so you had to actively seek them out. Maybe that isn't the way hiring managers approach the field anymore, though.
My blog post goes through the process for inbound candidates, which accounted for the majority of our hiring. We did actively try to poach folks as well. I spent literally 4 years trying to recruit one of my friends out of Microsoft.
For these folks, you need to sell, sell, sell your vision, product and team. They're not going to switch unless they're really pumped. All of this work to get them excited happens before the interview process even begins.
I think for these people the difficulty of the interview process is a small issue relative to the risk of switching away from a job they already like.
Speaking from the candidate's perspective, as someone with performance anxiety, I abhor live coding sessions. Best case, I'm thinking at an impaired level due to the anxiety. Worst case, I can't think at all and freeze up completely.
Therefore, I absolutely love it when companies offer a take home project. And you're right: I'm probably not going to do it unless I'm really interested in the company.
I'm actually going to be doing one this weekend, and I don't mind spending 4-6 hours on it, because at this point in the interview process, I'm really excited about potentially working for this company.
I brought in my half finished side project. We talked about it, he asked me some questions, I showed him a couple of things about the tech stack that he didn't know. He asked me to add a basic feature. It worked well for both of us. If I had been faking it I think it would have shown.
Do also spare a thought for the people who don't have side projects, or any code that they can legitimately share. There are plenty of talented engineers in that position, and it'd be a shame to have a hiring process that leaves them out in the cold.