I think there's a lot of truth to this, and to the argument that work-sample testing really only works as well as I like to say it does when you have an engineering culture that can metabolize new hires without much previous experience in your particular problem domain. But we started doing work-samples for the opposite reason: because we kept getting bamboozled by good interviewers --- a problem I know to be rife across the whole industry. I still think you're better off keeping most of the weight of your qualification process on practical challenges rather than interviews.

We have not generally had a problem recruiting people with experience in our field, but there's obviously some selection bias in that observation.