You're on the right track. At my job, we use Vagrant and VMWare Fusion to load up our dev environments. I'm thinking it might be trivial (or at least, less complicated) to simply give the VM to my candidate... The problem is that sometimes they don't have VMWare or VirtualBox. Ideally, I'd just write a single script that installs everything for them, so all they have to do is write code...
Even "Lets have a quick chat on Skype" can be a pain in the arse. I use Linux, and don't use Skype regularly, so its frequently the case that I haven't set up /used Skype on whatever laptop I happen to have at the time.
People might assume that I am some sort of idiot for not using Skype, but I have a proper VOIP number setup, so I don't have the need.
