Most of the engineers that I've hired came from another job (not all though), and so they need a confirmed offer before they are willing to jump ship.
So this practice introduces its own selection bias; you'd only be sampling from the pool of currently un-/fun-employed, and those who hate their current job enough to quit without a safe landing.
I'd vastly prefer to have a week or two of paid contract work from each candidate before making the decision, but it feels insulting to even ask.
But I wouldn't just do this. I think any company of any size needs a strong internship program to build their own pipeline. I also feel that you should be able to hire people without them doing contract work for you or other kinds of assignments. Talking with someone, going over code and APIs, etc. is usually good enough to gauge someone. If someone has years of experience, has stuff on Git and can talk coherently about what they are doing and why, they probably can program.
What I was saying is that if you insist on seeing code first, pay them as a contractor, don't ask them to do a bogus assignment for free.
Unless you work on Google or something with the same size, more than you expect to hire.
And yes, you will biasing your candidate pool. Every kind of procedure will bias the candidate pool. Again, unless your company is Google-sized, the only important thing about that bias is if it align with the preponderant bias (what is bad) or not.
If you mean (which is bad) then I agree completely. You want your set of biases (biases being errors in hiring, meaning the things you select on that don't match with what the job needs) to be as different as possible from the rest of the industry. Whenever you can pick up people who are good who aren't getting picked up by the rest of the industry, everyone wins.
If you are not one of those companies, your focus should be on making sure you are not biased the same way as them. Other means of avoiding rejecting good candidates have a much lower return.
Maybe the lesson here is that the "optimal" strategy is to simply not abstract the problem. Its not "a person" you're hiring, its Bob. And Bob is more comfortable doing X or Y or Z, and Bob is best tested for his skills in ABC manner, etc.
There is _literally no chance_ that I am going to leave an existing job for a "week or two" contract with a company. If that's part of their hiring process, I will simply look elsewhere.
Maybe that's a Silicon Valley thing?
People might have clauses to prevent people from working on similar work for competitors, sure, but I haven't seen anything that bars working on other kinds of projects outside of work.
Though as you say your a journalist they tend to be exceptions.
But if you're working someplace salaried, it seems fairly dishonest to spin up a short contract. especially when most of the attention is consumed in the process of getting started (environment, implicit policies, platform, etc).
plus on your side, you don't really know how much of that person you're getting. if the work is great, thats fine, but if it seems slow or misguided, is that a fundamental reflection of ability, or because they tried to cram it in between 8pm and 11pm every night?
Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)...
The optimal way would be if lawmakers could create some sort of "employed contractor", however I can think of a dozen ways for employers to screw over poor people with it...
It's not like the job "Uber driver" where the fundamental nature of the job means you can't be a contractor.
At least in the US, this isn't a problem. You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. No need to have any kind of established company/status, because by default anyone running a business without incorporating or organizing is operating a sole proprietorship--it's basically 1 extra form at tax time.
As long as the person you're paying is doing business under their name, they generally won't even need to open a second bank account (they might want to if they do this more than occasionally).
Wow, that's awesome. What happens, for example, if someone is unemployed, then doing work for you and either gets sick on his own or gets injured on the job?
In Germany, for an employed person, the medical insurance would cover #1 and the Unfallversicherung (accident insurance) of the employer would cover #2. Let me guess: the (potential) employee is totally uninsured in the US during such an relationship?
For the first case--nothing at all.
For the second case--generally nothing as long as the person is really an independent contractor.
In the US there are guidelines that determine whether someone is an employee or a contractor. For example is the person flexible to work whenever they want, or do they have to be in the office from 9-5. Does the person have to wear a uniform etc. Is the position short term etc...
So if someone were injured on the job, they could claim that they even though the company said they were an independent contractor, they were actually an employee because of xyz.
Most employers know this so they take steps to ensure independent contractors actually fit the guidelines for independent contractor. And in the case of paying a tech contractor for a few weeks, it's usually pretty clear cut.
The IRS has guidelines on who is considered an employee. If you set their hours, provide equipment for them to use and there's a few other things I forget, they are a de-facto employee regardless of how you pay them: 1099 or W2. This is why a lot of larger companies will not employ sole-proprietors directly. They require you to either go through a contracting company or set up some corporate structure so that you can't claim to be one of their employees.
>This is why a lot of larger companies will not employ sole-proprietors directly.
There are plenty of large companies that do contract directly. For example, Coke does it all the time.
Is this problematic? Here in Portugal I just update my status in the tax authority website, then declare the extra income when filing my taxes (plus possibly pay social security for that month). You don't need to create a company or anything like that.
Companies dont do a week or two of contract work because people that have strong experience will just say no.