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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.

The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

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The question is whether companies would tolerate their own process if their employees did that recruiting process at a different company. They obviously do to some extent via plausible deniability; I have a 1 hour "doctors" appointment this afternoon, or I'm taking leave on Monday. Using it as cover to attend an interview.

Would this company permit an employee taking 3 months unpaid leave to provisional hire somewhere else and have free choice whether they stay or go at the end of it.

>> A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.

Yes, standard interview loops also discriminate, and the more time they take, the more discriminatory they are. Any on-site requirements compound the issues.

Like Yegge says: provisional employment/internships solve all of these issues. You get the best of all worlds: stable employment for the candidate where they get paid a regular wage and aren't under a stressful interview setting, and lots and lots of work samples for you, the employer. It's not perfect. For example, it can be difficult to entrust the provisional employee/intern with anything impactful if you don't know whether they'll be employed at the end. But it is significantly better than the alternatives in most contexts.

Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm. I concede that provisional hires are higher-signal than work sample testing (or rather: that they're the platonic ideal of work sample testing), but the entire problem of hiring qualification is to make decisions in the context of a candidate doing a job search.

>> Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm.

It works. I’ve seen it in two different places.

At the second one, the fundamental realization I came to was that it is virtually no different than “regular” employment, where the new employee can get fired for not meeting expectations within an arbitrary time period after being hired. This can be months, or even weeks. From the perspective of the candidate, regular employment and provisional employment have roughly the same level of risk: in both cases they take a job where they might be let go at some point. The benefit of provisional employment is that they know how long they will be evaluated for and against whom. It turns out a lot of candidates do in fact like the all-cards-on-the-table approach and enjoy being given the opportunity to prove themselves on the job.

Everything will "work" in the sense of you'll eventually get somebody in the job. To me, it's self-evident that a process that disqualifies everybody unwilling to work for weeks speculatively isn't actually working, at a minimum because it DQs most (probably all) competitive candidates. But yes, your mileage may vary.

I’m curious though… these days I’ve to apply for n number of jobs to get 1.

Let’s say I get someone to do this provisional work. What about my existing job? I can’t just ignore it, and I can’t just causally say at my current company that I’m interviewing anywhere else.

And god forbid you like 2 potential gigs, and they both want you to do the campfire approach. Then my current job is really screwed!

Provisional employment only makes sense if you work remotely and have full benefits (esp. healthcare). Moving is costly.

A committed or indefinite term of employment is itself a benefit, so if you're going to work on a temporary basis you should expect contractor returns, not FTE comp; revise your baseline up 150%-200%.

Nobody does this, of course, but then provisional employment is a silly idea to begin with.

It has to be more than that. 150-200 is what your rate is _if you have a pipeline for more work_. If you don’t, you need to account for building the pipeline. So if a non-contract job wants me to work like a contractor, they have to account for the risk they’ve asked me to assume.

FWIW I came up with a provisional employment scheme that I thought would work at a job where I was responsible for hiring pipelines. It involved making an annual bonus (in an industry that was bonus driven) garaunteed and accelerating it so it was 50% sign on bonus and 50% delivered at 6 months. The company balked. Because provisional screening is a very good mechanism. Its must more expensive than hire and fire, at least on paper.

I feel like you could get around the AI bit by asking about components and what they do, rationale for decisions, etc. If someone can't speak to it, it should be a clear tell.

We hire entirely based on work sample testing, and there's a lot of stuff you can do to make it work in with AI-equipped candidates; I'm not prepared to write it up at the moment, but you start by recognizing that everybody is going to be using AI and designing the tests accordingly, and by relying on unassisted interactive challenges as a component of the process.

As long as you are talking to them face to face; over the phone they will use AI with speech recognition and parrot its response, erasing all signal. Then the interview becomes all about AI detection.

I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer.

It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talked about than experienced.

Ive had people show up at onsites that were clearly not the same person I screened over the phone earlier as far back as 2013 at google. It’s real. Just ask any recruiters from well known companies and they’ll tell you. It’s happening to more and more startups too now because it’s gotten easier

I believe you, but again: I haven't experienced anything like this, ever. One of the clearest results we got at Matasano adopting this approach was a drastic reduction in turnover, which is exactly the opposite of what you expect to see if people are scamming their way into jobs they can't do. That's held up (I don't have the before/after comparison, but I do have the industry-wide comparison) over the years afterwards. We hire these people, then we work with them, and they're amazing.

I read that post back in the day and have remembered it ever since, and used it as a basis for the process at my current employment. Thank you!

(For those interested: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

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