In your hiring process, how do you do tech interviews? Do you give the candidate a standardized coding questions?
Do you give your candidate a real assignment in your own code-base? That sounds risky as you expose your code to many candidates.
I know that some companies give coding assignments that might take many hours, sometimes more than a day for the candidate to complete. Are the candidates paid?
How does AI impact your evaluation process? Do you try to ban using AI in these assignments?
It is clear that using AI some candidates in some of the cases will be able to drastically improve their results. How do you factor that in?
Have you tried to ask them to do some paid(!) work in an Open Source project?
If your company has Open Source projects relevant to this candidate then you can find or create issues in those projects.
Even if your company has not published any Open Source project or if you don't have any meaningful issue there, you certainly use a lot of open source tools and libraries. Either directly or indirectly. Those tools and libraries have tons of open issues. You could pick an issue in one of those project. You could even leave to the candidate to pick a project and pick some issues to fix. Then you could evaluate the job they have done.
Have you tried giving assignments in Open Source projects as part of your interview process? How did it go?