One solution that seemed to be the best of both is, a take home test followed by pair programming session to add a small feature on top of that, or refactor som

One solution that seemed to be the best of both is, a take home test followed by pair programming session to add a small feature on top of that, or refactor something, or write tests etc. Real world challenges needs time to think, often time to refactor after initial working prototype. A take home allows that. Also the candidate is already relaxed in the pair programming session because it's a familiar codebase. You'll get signal if they didn't write it or wrote something they didn't quite understand.