Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who has been writing a lot about good interview questions and how to hire well:

Work sample tests are an exercise, a simulation, a small slice of real day-to-day work that we ask candidates to perform. They’re practical, hands-on, and very close or even identical to actual tasks the person would perform if hired. They’re also small, constrained, and simplified enough to be fair to include in a job selection process.

To give you a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about, here are several examples of work sample tests I’ve used…

And just in case you think he’s prescribing whiteboarding…

However, work sample tests are also a minefield: the space is littered with silly practices like whiteboarding, FizzBuzz, Leetcode, and “reverse a linked list”-style bullshit. The point of this series is to separate these silly practices from the good ones and to give you a framework and several examples to use in your hiring rounds.