In person means everything past the initial tech / recruiter screen, which is a very low bar just to see if we think it’s worth flying them out. The alternative is you will hire people and you can’t know if they fraudulently interviewed using things like the tools above, or even if the person who interviewed is the same person who applied and will show up on day one.
For smaller companies in particular the above can be catastrophic, so I recommend they adapt to changing times.
I agree that in-person is much better. I’m also no fan of LeetCode tests. I won’t get into all the reasons, but I feel they actively harm the process.
I was a manager for over 25 years, and did lots of interviews, with no technical testing. It was all in-person, with the company covering the expense of the interview. I think some of our best hires, came from independent recruiters (headhunters).
I feel that I never made a mistake, technically, but I believe that a couple of my hires didn’t end up integrating well with the team.
Remote work is now a part of the landscape. It’s actually not new. I worked for a long time, in the 1990s, with a Boston-based contractor, who I have never met, in person. We paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, over many years, and he did outstanding work.
We got him through an old-fashioned recruiter. A good “old school” recruiter could save a company a lot of up-front time, by doing their own vetting and networking. They would demand a fairly significant “finders fee,” but in my experience, it was worth it.
I didn’t say anything about leetcode, and I didn’t say anything about remote work.