This should come to no surprise to anyone: I love searching for jobs. When you have been fired as many times as I have from yobs, you learn to enjoy the process that is involved in nailing one down. Yes, this makes me perfect for the freelance role; however, I have yet to find a way to break into that club.
Anyway, I spent this Friday in a "surprise interview" and nailed every last section besides...yep, you guessed it: the technical section. It isn't that I freeze or can't answer their questions, it is the simple fact that writing code on a whiteboard is the least functional way to figure out what someone knows. The equivalent is this. And, personally, my hips aren't that mobile.
One of the best techincal interviews I ever had the grace to be apart of was with Harvest. It was all over the phone, no code writing on a fucking whiteboard, and 100% of it relevant to what occurs while working with a "brown field app". If you are a hiring manger, please think carefully about your technical questions and DON'T make the participant scribble their answer on a board.
Update: This blog post nicely defines some of the more "technical" reasons behind why programming on whiteboards makes little sense.