It would be interesting to see your recommended best practices from a hiring manager perspective. I find these requests are usually overly vague. Often, they require an extreme amount of time, especially after a candidate has spent several hours with you already going through a gauntlet of interviews. If you are a good interviewer, you should be able to assess these skills in the interview or with a ten minute exercise onsite. They can be helpful for more senior roles at the end of a rigorous search process when you have two equally qualified candidates. I find they are often done too soon with too many people and too few parameters.