If you instead hire for "engineering" positions, without caring about what languages the candidate knows, you can interview for their ability to solve practical programming exercises [1] in whatever language they are most familiar/comfortable with. Maybe this only works at FAANG-level hiring, but in these contexts, top tier candidates can get things done in any language, and that's really what matters, no? But more to your point, I've generally found candidates that pick Python (or Ruby/Perl/etc) can actually accomplish more–and therefore prove their capabilities–in the space of an interview simply because they're picking a more expressive language. Bad candidates will prove they are bad candidates no matter what language they choose.

1: Eg, reading/manipulating files, merging/filtering/sorting data, generating and processing multi-dimensional data structures, etc.