Train before you hire
blog.codelesson.com
blog.codelesson.com
"It's a bit easier to tell if someone's in great shape physically than if they're in great shape mentally. You can't just stare at their brain and hope to find a six-pack in all those folds. It's easy to tell how physically fit someone is. You can make people run laps, lift things, take their physical measurements, etc.
But for determining someone's mental fitness, you pretty much have to interview them. It it's hard to do a good job of it, since it's like running backwards in front of the person, egging them to go faster. You have to be in pretty good shape yourself to be a good interviewer."
If we don't hire you, we pay you as a contractor for your time. If we do hire you, we pay you either as an employee or contractor for your time (depending on what our accountant says).
We'll bend the rules depending on circumstances, but basically you're not getting in unless you spend 30 hours pairing with our devs. Anything else, I propose, can be hazardous to the culture and effectiveness of your company.
And what percentage of people do you "drop"? I imagine once you spend a week with someone you might get attached to them enough that it would be hard to let them go for something subjective unless they were a pretty big asshole.
As far as the "unemployed" part goes, things aren't usually as cut-and-dried as that. Of those five, one was on the verge of being laid off, and one was a student. The other three were gainfully employed. Being open to working weekends with candidates makes this much more possible, though more lengthy.
We're pretty proud of who we are. If your desire to work with us is strong enough, you'll find a way. And if you do find a way under difficult circumstances, it says volumes about your personal drive.
The approach may work for you, but most companies seem to have the idea that they are special, when they really aren't - and frankly most people wouldn't accept your requirements unless they where truly desperate so you will likely have to change your approach as you grow.
Hiring should be at least as important to the team as to any manager. (After all, they're the ones who have to "live with" the new hire.) I can see this working if the team is flexible enough to accomodate the potential employee's current work schedule, assuming the potential is also flexible enough to take on the extra load for a bit.
If you are in the U.S. I hope you've had this hiring process reviewed by your legal counsel. Given the brief description above you are quite possibly violating several federal employment laws in addition to IRS rules on what constitutes a contractor vs an employee.
We send out the necessary W-9s and everything. Effectively, our candidates are freelancers until we hire them... and we pay our freelancers according to IRS rules.
You now update to say you pay your "freelancers" however in your first post you say you take your accountants advice on paying as an employee or a contractor. Those are two extremely different things and back dating employment (via pay as an employee during the trial period) would have the end result of your company incurring liability for failing to complete employment paperwork in a timely manner among other things. You could also open yourself to liability for discrimination and other issues if you tried to pay someone as an employee, started the hiring paperwork and then found out the individual did not have valid work authorization.
Just to say it one more time so there's no confusion. This is not legal advice. Anyone considering anything in the content of this message or implementing the parent posters hiring process should speak to legal counsel before doing so.
With a moment of clarity, I do recall our employees having to go through the W-9 process. In addition, not all work was "under the company umbrella." For example, if a candidate paired with an employee during a users group hack night, that was taken into consideration. Like I said, rules are made to be bent.
As to other hiring practices your comment on pay specifically raised a red flag with me if for no other reason than if you paid someone for work as an employee you'd be back dating their date of hire (as far as the government is concerned). My day job is with a company specializing in a very tiny portion of the hiring process and we see large and small companies screw it up every day. The M-247 Handbook for Employers is nearly 70 pages about how to fill out nothing more than the Federal I-9 Form. Screwing up that process can generate civil and criminal liability at the federal level. Then if you are in a state that has additional restrictions (Colorado and more coming soon) you could be incurring even more liability. Have federal contracts and get this process wrong? Potentially kiss them goodbye thanks to the FAR clause.
M-274 Handbook for Employers: http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/m-274.pdf
There are a lot of potential pitfalls employers face and it's unfortunate that the government does a pretty poor job of making it clear what the employers responsibilities are as well as consistently enforcing the rules that are on the books.
I want to be clear, I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything like that. Based solely on your initial comment I would be concerned about your hiring practice and make sure your counsel doesn't see anything wrong with it. If you are bringing in 100% of the people for a trial basis as contractors and meet the IRS rules you may have nothing to worry about. If you bring one person on under that methodology described (as a backdated employee) you could have some liability sitting in your employee records that you can't fix.
The other issue for the employed in that scenario is that their employment contracts may prohibit moonlighting/contracting or have a non compete that would interfere with the trail/interview process.
All that to say, I'm a big proponent of taking the time (and yes it does take time) to find out if somebody is smart and willing to learn and leaving resumes with #yrs experience in technology X to the HR monkeys. If a skill is in demand, a latent expert is of much higher long-term value than a present one.
"Today I had an epiphany. Maybe the right thing to do is to enroll prospective job applicants in some kind of low-impact training as part of the interview process. If the training were given in a part-time, online format (like we do at CodeLesson)..."
And I've gotten so much value out of HN discussions that benefit the site linkee (lots of awesome threads start out "Show HN: My new site/business").
I guess my main point is: I'm all for the business linked to getting PR, as long as we, the HN members get some cool value out of it. In this case, i thought the post was very topical because talent/skill shortage is a frequently talked about issue here, as are work cultural norms in general.
But I totally respect the opinion that some posts may not have an interesting enough ideas to make PR interesting. That said, I always wait for the other shoe to drop: the HN thread it spawns often ends up being incredible.
That would apply to about a third of the posts that make it to the HN front page nowadays, I'd say ;-)
Of course, many of us instead realized we hated call centers and found part time sysadmin jobs. :)