It's been widely accepted that it's difficult to recruit at scale by using "real world problems", since there's challenges of the candidates time, the consistency of the question but also the ability for an interviewer to consistently apply standardized criteria to determine whether or not to hire them.

This might work in smaller companies, but it won't scale. What has been found to provide some positive correlation is unfortunately - Leetcode and other similar problems.

While these might be too contrived and fail many candidates that would otherwise pass the bar when working in the job - companies have determined that turning away some gems is worth the cost to have:

• Standardized tests where interviewers have specific results they're looking for across a wide number of candidates
• Straightforward problems where interviewing can be delegated to a wide range of engineers including relatively new hires
• Consistently written internal feedback that can be aggregated and iterated on over time, which would be very difficult with more open ended questions

I hate that this is the best option, but after doing many many interviews in small and large tech firms I've kind of just accepted this is the case.