Networking aptitude tests

Hello! This subreddit has helped me many times when I have run into strange Cisco issues throughout the years and I am forever grateful. I am now looking for a solution to assist me in hiring some new engineers at my company.

In the last couple of years I have cast my net wide and brought in some amazing candidates... sometimes on paper only it turns out. The resumes have the jargon, they go through a couple of interviews with management and then a final interview with some of the engineers that will be their peers. Our job involves installing temporary specialized networks in very short windows of time. A handful of the new hires (even ones fresh out of college) grasped the fundamentals of networking quite well and have excelled at their job. A majority of them have failed and their coworkers have either had to step in, or in cases where they are too busy, I have had to spend hours on the phone after hours and on weekends to ensure we get the job done.

In an effort to alleviate these problems going forward, I am trying to build a "lab" that the applicants will have to complete properly in order to progress in the hiring process. I toyed around with having some physical gear that they would touch in one of my two offices, but it would require quite a bit of work due to Covid protocols we have in place for our clients, along with the fact that we have had to open our hiring to people out of state. More than half the applicants can't even be bothered to reply to emails within 72 hours, so I really can't expect them to travel across the country to take a test.

I am basically looking for a testing platform that I can load up with a few Cisco devices (ASA, core switch, WLC, edge switches) and a basic visio of how the network should be architected along with a list of VLANs required, SSIDs required, and public IP info. Depending on the outcome of their build, I can advance people based on their true skills. If it is something simple like forgetting to make a NAT rule for a VLAN, I can bring them back in and say something like "the customer on vlan 604 is stating that they get an IP but can't get Internet, can you troubleshoot that?" If the applicant can't even get the WAN interface configured, they won't be coming back for a final interview.

I haven't used Routersim and Packet Tracer in quite some time, so I don't know if those are feasible given the specific hardware in our design. The applicants would need to have their own sandbox for me to view and it would be nice to know when they started and finished so I can try to rule out copying of designs or cheating. I would even be willing to pay monthly or per "test" for a testing platform if there is one out there.