If you're asking for C with 4.5 hours of work (as per example above) that's fine if you're paying for their time.
Cheaper than a bad hire, stops you missing out on good hires who think "fuck that".
Cheaper than a bad hire, stops you missing out on good hires who think "fuck that".
Does it? If I have a developer job then I'm paid well and don't really care about the money which I have enough of, I care about the time which I have very little of.
If you're in the top 0.01% of companies to work for (and the applicant knows that) then it's probably a worthwhile time investment, but for the other 99.99% it's a waste.
These tests are typically a pre-interview step and they don't really work well for much apart from that. So at this point I'm not interviewing with the company and all I know is that they have an interesting job ad. Considering how far from reality job ads can be I'm not going to waste hours based on one.
Also there is usually more than one person sitting with the interviewee when they come in, so the company time spent is multiplied at that stage.