All this discussion is spot on. The problem is all these startups now think they are FAANG companies also. You're not Google dude and you're probabaly passing on great hires and making the hiring process harder on everyone.
We recently did a bunch of hiring. Our coding excersize was practical and involved working through some existing code that had a bug and extending it. They had to be able to state the problem back to us clearly. It was take home solutions submitted to git. It was simple to weed through candidates looking at the code for 30 secs. We looked for things like clean code and well thought out solutions. We didn't do the silly BigO optimization stuff that every company is obsessed with. We've been very happy with our hires.
We recently did a bunch of hiring. Our coding excersize was practical and involved working through some existing code that had a bug and extending it. They had to be able to state the problem back to us clearly. It was take home solutions submitted to git. It was simple to weed through candidates looking at the code for 30 secs. We looked for things like clean code and well thought out solutions. We didn't do the silly BigO optimization stuff that every company is obsessed with. We've been very happy with our hires.