It would be nice if there was at least a bare bones certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop and if statement is. You’d still have to interview the candidate but you wouldn’t have to start at Hello World or FizzBuzz.

I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.