> Asking a candidate to solve some problem which lets a candidate work in a slightly less high stakes environment. but requires candidates to do extra work, taking longer than just the interview.
I refuse a lot of these. I've put a lot of time into many of them, just to be ghosted.
Typically, when the take-home comes with a laundry list of frameworks and 3rd party libraries, I walk away. Coming up to speed with all of them is too time consuming for the probability of getting ghosted.
It takes a lot of work on the interviewers side to come up with a good take-home. It requires discipline to reject the temptation to just throw in a laundry list of requirements.