Do you tend to prefer doing a take-home task or completing a testing task during a video call in an interview process?
Assuming you get sufficient information upfront for both.
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Neither, if the company wants me, they’ll want me 
I’m not going to do a test for it haha. I mean I hacked a company once before and interview and gave them the report. I also once had a dump of a companies passwords which I found in a breach, also passed it on the interview over (and they worked).
I come prepared to an interview, so I don’t need to do any tests, because there are many options available
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Really depends what it is.
If its a test of some sort, do it before the interview in own time.
When I get something new to work on, I generally have a lot of questions and tend to like to do research before starting on the task. Give me the gist of things in advance I can do a bit of research and then do the questioning and solutioning during an interview, no problem with that. They will want to assess my thought and idea process so may aswell do that live.
The last one, after an initial chat with a CTO I volunteered to prepare a workshop for their team and that workshop was the interview by six of their testers, the team made the hiring decision not the CTO. It’s free work for them but I had a good feeling and was happy to do that. It’s likely I would take that approach again as I gained far more insight to make my own decision that way aswell.
One time before that I had to do an sql test on the spot, no advance notice and it had been a decade since I used SQL. Ended up explaining in writing my approach to it rather than actually solving the problem itself, I didn’t get passed that interview. Thing is my sql was actually fairly good and I just would have needed a refresher on it, had it been a take home task I’d have been fine.
Graduates tend to pass these sort of on the spot exams better than more experienced people, they are more used to to exams but it rarely translates to work ability so can put good candidates off the company.
I prefer to do a task during the interview.
99% of take-home assignments take more time than they say, especially if you are a perfectionist who wants to do every possible feature.
99% of take-home tasks are unpaid. Some companies can use the results as a “free testing service.”
I like doing it “live” with the interviewers. One of my strengths is my thinking process, which I’m good at doing out loud, so I like being able to explain what I’m considering, and why I’m (not) doing certain things. It also gives me the chance to ask questions, seek clarification, and reduces the chances of going down the wrong path / showing off the “wrong” thing. It also doesn’t require me to dedicate extra hours to the process.
I’ll answer on both sides of the fence as this is subject dear to my heart 
If I was the interviewee, I…would…hate…both. The thing is when you test someone like this, there isn’t necessarily a right answer. There’s a different answer + your interpretation of whether its good answer or not. If you have a few tests to compare, your natural instinct is go with the answer you prefer. So your putting all that effort into the tasks but there will always be an element of subjective assessment.
I want to talk to people, I want to discuss the very reason they’re recruiting and understand their problems. I want to get excited by it and tell them I could help with that. If I need to learn something, cool. I’ve got a 35 year career, a CV that shows years of service in companies performing roles with a list of achievements with skills acquired along the way. But yeah skip that and give me task to prove I’m worthy…No.
If I’m the interviewer, I give the candidate the choice. Bottom line, show off. Do you want a task? Fine here’s a task, have you got something you can show me now? Fine, show it. Shall we demo what you’d be testing and talk about it? Yeah lets do it. I want to know if they can work well with the team and culture, get excited by the challenges we have, learn, speak up etc.
I say this from experience. I’ve tried live tests and its an utterly alien environment to the one they’ll be working in. They’ll never experience that pressure in reality where a group of people are watching them code or test assessing them, so that didn’t work for me.
Sending them tasks to do at home was better if you can give them complete freedom and a wide timescale. But even then, you’re assuming their lifestyle can easily fit it in. You’re assuming they’ll prioritise your tasks over everything else in their life. Its heaped in the judgement of people if they struggle, not understanding.
Have I made mistakes in recruitment? Absolutely. The key area was always they didn’t fit in the culture. They could be brilliant coders, brilliant testers but I’m building a team of people that care about each other, learn from each other and share in success and failure.
I do think recruitment and recruiters, need to wake up to how you build great teams…not just look for a person for a role to tick a skills box at 1 point in time.
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