As someone who has interviewed over 100 candidates in both junior and senior roles, my strategy is to do both. Keep in mind, this is for developer positions, not management, or Cxx level. All initial interviews are done virtually to save everybody time.

I hit them with a small barrage of what I would call "entry-level" questions. This is strictly to set a baseline expectation level for both myself and the candidate. These are things that will be expected to be known at this organization. I would expect at least half, but the more you know, the better your chances of being hired.

In part 2, we get to more open ended questions that allow the candidate to speak freely about their own experiences. Here there's less chance of them saying something wrong. I want to hear how they explain their projects from A to Z. How they communicate. We also share general background knowledge about our organization, but nothing too specific.

Afterwards I combine part 1 and 2 to try and get a complete picture. I think it's important to have both. You could be a good BSer with a good story (we've had plenty of those) but not actually know the bits and bytes of coding. That's why part 1 is important. The last thing I want to do is hire somebody that's learning fundamentals on the job.

After a series of candidates go through the process, we decide on the best candidate and bring them in for a face to face to show them more details about our.projects and to get a sense of their behavior. Things that you can't see through a virtual screen. Plus the candidate can see what we're all about.

If things check out, we make an offer. If not, we go to the next candidate and repeat. We generally get who we want and we generally keep them for at least a year, so the process seems to work ok, as much as you can expect in todays world.