Look at my current stuff, talk to my references, and yeah even give me a take home project, but these online tests are for the birds. Even worse are the timed ones. Implement this algorithm in 20 minutes or you're not good enough. Pay no attention to that ticking counter in the corner of the page. Ridiculous.
I think coding tests are mostly useful for young candidates and/or candidates without portfolios. What I am looking for in the assignments is naming and style consistency, clarity and good common sense. This is rarely found in school projects which is often the only code a candidate can show us.<p>Note that in France most of the companies expressly forbid employees to have side projects which can earn money, and are very wary of contributions to open source. This makes it stupidly hard to get useful code examples from anybody with only a few years of experience.