They actually do. What they told me is that if you are an open source contributor for important open source, or you have 3 people within company that want you, you can skip the whole process. There are surely more ways to skip it. Not sure why they didn't do it for that Homebrew guy.

> when you express interest in the company.

I was mentioning that these days often HackerRank is step 0 of interviewing process, like what used to be technical phone screen. And that holds even for recruiting agencies if you want to have your CV featured there, even for underwhelming jobs. TopTal IIRC also does that.

> they saved time and money by not doing lengthy and involved interviews

I wouldn't be so sure here. You can be easily played, i.e. you are in Seattle, somebody wants to visit friends there, schedules an interview with you, you pay flights + hotels because you are happy to talk to them, they use you and extract whatever information they wanted to acquire from you and then tell you they decided for another alternative, but went there mostly to visit friends/relatives/handle some administrative business. It happens.

> Please propose a better process!

It's tricky. The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. With this you IMO cut the people you want/need the most as they usually value their time. Maybe if you offered compensated initial interviews to people you spent some time researching, that could help? That would be a signal you did your research already as you wouldn't want to waste money on random people, and that you appreciate them dedicating time talking to you?

Bring the candidate on site for a 4 hour coding session. Provide a standard list of questions the scale in difficulty. Think:

1) Fizzbuzz

2) Reverse a string

3) Write a calculator class/script

...

100) Write an algorithm that can search compressed text without decompressing it

So you see how far and correct they can get with an IDE ... and maybe no internet connection.

Noon - Hiring Manager lunch Afternoon - 1 or 2 design interviews on the white board.

So you have done a few things here that I want to outline.

A) You got rid of the stupid whiteboard

B) You have one process that scales for experience levels!

C) You can tailor the problem set at a certain of difficulty to specific languages

This interview style ensures the developer/engineer knows how to code, and can be weighted appropriately to certain skill levels.