Ask HN: How to evaluate a person who reached out to work for free? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to evaluate a person who reached out to work for free?

2 pointskrupskis6 comments

I am a final year student in Europe. I have started a side-project, we are building a platform and have multiple partners and approximately 900 registered users.

The core team is 2 friends of mine and me. All of us are Computer Science students. I am the one who spends time designing, recruiting partners for our platform.

Early in the project, some people joined along to work few hours a week (for free), but lost motivation to work on it pretty quickly. Mind you, all of them came from my personal network.

A week ago a random business student contacted me saying she has been thinking about the same idea for quite some time, but was missing the technical capabilities. She would like to join us and collaborate on growing the platform (marketing, business, recruiting of partners, social media management). She offered to do it for free and mentioned that she would likely work on a similar platform regardless if we partnered up or not.

After the first experiences of people joining us, I am hesitant to accept such offers. It usually resulted in people not doing the tasks and with me overtaking their responsibilities after a month of inactivity.

What would be your take and how would you evaluate a candidate who is willing to work for free?

I wouldn’t burden her with your past experience of your personal network. The motivations of them and her are likely different - one helping you out the other has a genuine interest. Make it easy for her to join but she has to add net value so just make that clear. Given her interest in the area she may also be looking to get more insight into how you’re approaching things so you might want a non compete. It’s probably hard to enforce even if you bothered but her reaction to it should be telling.

Define the failure points of the previous volunteers. Come up with a set of KPI's (key performance indicators) that a volunteer you would deem as successful, would hit after a month's work. Try her out for a solid month and evaluate her KPI's. you can figure out the rest

I don't really like the KPI angle, but overall I agree. Impress on her that free or not, your going to treat it as a job, and that (in whatever diplomatic terms you want) if she doesn't contribute as agreed she's fired, paid or not.

I've had a similar problem, and I was hesitant to be to hard on the unpaid person, because he wasn't paid. Like your case, this was not a question of trying to get cheap labor, he wasn't doing me a favor, but still somehow it feels like there's less leverage without a real pay cheque, and it makes it harder to take a hard stance, but imo that's how it needs to be managed.

Thanks for sharing. It indeed feels odd to be hard on people that volunteer. I tried going with an approach of total freedom and let's collaborate to deliver something, but that didn't really work out. I will try to think about how I can incorporate accountability into by setting deliverablers. Cheers to both of you.

People need to money to live, so she wants a job or equity. This is just a roundabout way of getting it.

Experiences is valuable too

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