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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

How many engineers would accept an offer which is conditional on "a week or two of contract work"?

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.

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I wonder if having multiple ways you can hire would be beneficial here. Behind Door number 1 is a confirmed job offer after 5 hours of grueling technical interviews. Behind Door number 2 is a 30 day probation offer after an hour long soft skills + tech interview, etc..

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.

This is the most reasonable thing I’ve read in this thread. Totally makes sense.

> How many engineers would accept an offer which is conditional on "a week or two of contract work"?

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.

> 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.

That's what I meant. Ideally, job offers should have the largest possible diversity of biases (this is better for both sides). That's very hard to happen on practice for many reasons, one of them being that a few companies concentrate most of the offers.

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.

Agreed. I guess you could make the contract route optional. I mean have the standard interview route or the contract route - ask the candidates to pick what they want.

I agree.. especially if the candidate is just looking for an "upgrade". Personally I left a very stable telco job for a 6 month contract with high chance of renewal or offered FT. The thing that made me say yes was the contract rate was ~50% more compensation than my previous job and I had contacts there. If it was anything less, I wouldn't have left.

What we have done is hired people as contractors when we have overflow work. We'll pay you a high overly rate to do extra work for us each week. They usually already have gigs and want some extra cash. Others might be doing contract work full time. But if we really like working together, we chat about making the arrangement permanent.

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.

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