Did you apply online when you were on canada? Im curious as how did you get a job from Netherlands to Canada? Did you apply or you know someone from canada?
While I was in university I needed to do an internship, so I went to a smaller game company in the Netherlands, once the internship was done I got a job at the same place. About 2 years in one of the guys I was working with knew a person working here in Canada and he wanted change jobs, so he did. A couple months later he asked me if I wanted to change jobs to, so I went for interviews. I then later asked another guy, but he failed the interviews.
At that time I had very little (1-2 years) experience and the company wanted some re-assurance that it was worth to move me over. So they flew me in and I had about 16 hours of on-site interviews, over the course of 2 days, for various different teams. Ranging from graphics to low level technology such as memory manager, file systems, etc. Mostly white boarding and the like. I was not too picky on what to work on, I just wanted to 'get in'... and luckily for me they accepted me. So I moved to Canada in 2007.
I have seen this kind of site before where HR use it to know how good the programmer is. It has some question and other things. Do you prefer people who can answer this or someone who has a portfolio and has something to show?
Well having a good portfolio and sending that out gets you noticed. You shouldn't be too picky and just literally send your resume to a lot of companies... A LOT of people are hiring because there is always a shortage on good programmers.
Once you get the phone interview (which usually happens before they fly you in for interviews.) you will have to know some 'on the spot' things (what does virtual do, what's the size of a long, what's a template, etc, simple stuff.) and it is not about white boarding. Usually questions on the phone go over what you have done (education, work project, hobby projects) and then some more technological simple stuff... usually related to what you worked on. So if your hobby project is rendering a voxel world or so then likely you will get questions about 'how did you make the drawing efficient -> spatial partioning/batching, etc. If your hobby project was a physics engine then you will be asked about iterative solvers, some basic math, etc. If you have great hobby projects then this will certainly make you 'stand out' because it means you are passionate about it. And as you pointed out... a lot of people are tired after work, so knowing that even after that a candidate still had passion to do something means a lot (for me personally it means more than the jobs they have held or the previous work they have done, mostly because a lot of people 'polish' their resume to look a lot better than they are, and it is a lot more difficult to fake a portfolio piece.)
Sometimes after the phone interview you get an 'assignment' where they expect you to do some test in your own time (usually 10-20 hours of work.) This ranges from making a small game like space invaders, to solving travelling sales man problem in an NP-complete situation (so we can see your creative approach), to writing a software 'rasterizer' for a particular data set. The main purpose of this is to see code quality/style.
Once you get an in studio interview you should be prepared for many questions along the ACM/Geeks for Geeks thing. I know we do it, we have a partly standardized test and some improvisational questions. Be cautious though, we usually easily pick out the people who 'memorized' solutions and that rates you worse than if you struggle to do the test and finish it half way.
So long story short. From my experience portfolio gets you 'noticed'/'invited', programming skills like ACM/Geeks for Geeks gets you 'hired'. But this is my opinion, so I wouldn't take it as 'the rule'
PS: For me I built a couple of things to get noticed. One was a simple 3D terrain editor with undo/redo, texture painting, height map painting, etc. Another was a simple physics engine, iterative solver, but did things like box-stacking. Then for my first job for the small company I did a terrain engine, with 3 other people, which was never released on PS3.
PS2: If you want you can send me a link to your portfolio and I can give some feedback.