I’m a former CTO. Here is the 15 sec coding test I used to instantly filter out 50% of unqualified applicants.

If you have a remote position open, your challenge is not attracting the correct candidate, it’s filtering out the bad ones, because you’ll have hundreds or thousands of them.

This my favorite technique:
Add a programming knockout question to the application process that is so simple to solve that only* unqualified developers will not do it manually.

Here’s the question:

result = 0
for x in [3,3,5]:
    if x >= 3:
        result = result - x
    else:
        result = result + x

What is result?

The logic of course is that for a good programmer it would be more of a hassle to copy, open an interpreter or ChatGPT, paste it, run it, then answer, than just run the code in their head.

I used a very similar question while I was CTO at MonetizeMore. Interesting things happened:

50% of candidates got the AI/Interpreter answer.

47% Answered the question correctly.

3% Answered incorrectly.

A few candidates resubmitted the application after getting the answer wrong (we didn’t tell them), one of those candidates was a great hire.

One candidate posted the incorrect question to a forum, and got an answer. So when subsequent candidates Googled the incorrect question, they got the wrong answer.

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*I should say this method is not perfect, and you’ll get false negatives, but I see it more as doubling your ability to process candidates, or reducing in half your recruitment time.