There should be some sort of standardized protocol for assessing technical skills

[laras126]

...and it's not coding algorithms on a whiteboard.

Interviewers: How do you assess technical knowledge at your company? What are your thoughts?
Interviewees: What types of projects and coding challenges have you been given in interviews? What did you think?

Is it even possible for us to come up with some kind of standardized process for companies to test candidates' skills, or are all positions too different?

[armaneous]

Should there be a standardized process? I'm not sure there should be, because every industry is different. You don't need to know how to architect large-scale, highly-distributed systems for building a native application that has minimal network requirements.

I think there's also a lot more leeway in coming up with a solution than most people are willing to admit. We already like to say, "there's more than one way to solve a problem," which is true. And if it is, how do you standardize that? It's almost as much expressive/style/preference as it is correct. In order to standardize, you'd need to get hyper technical and qualify exactly what kind of solution you'd want. That seems a little exhaustive.