A big challenge when hiring people is that of choosing someone for skilled jobs like programming or marketing. Both of these cannot be done on academic performance or simply asking questions that test memory and knowledge. My favorite approach is to test programmers by giving them a small task to be done on the computer. This not only tests their speed but also attitude apart from programming skill. While interviewing , As an Oracle database developer, I myself have faced interviews where the interviewer assigns tasks that are often offline and places trust on doing it and explaining the solution ranging to interviews that are largely about memory and involve questions that are straight out of the Oracle manual like what is the syntax for xyzzy command.