On Hiring: Trial Week - Yay or Nay? | Hacker News Reader

On Hiring: Trial Week - Yay or Nay?

fredwu.me

22 pointsfredwu45 comments

"Trial week" sounds like a pretty blatant attempt to keep the workforce young and dumb.

If you have other things going on in life (home, family), you're not going to roll the dice of getting canned in a week. And burning vacation time at a previous employer is (by my standard) an ethical issue to me. When I leave a gig, I generally give sufficient notice so that my duties can be transitioned in an orderly way. Obviously there are exception (ie. you give notice and get escorted out by company policy)

If your company need to do something like this, do it the Zappos way. Bring someone on and offer a check to leave after a certain period.

I would suggest the contrary.

As an employed person, I have some resistance to giving up a reasonable job to enter into a permanent contract that has potential but that may not suit me as much.

A trial week gives me, as a mature employee, an equal and fair chance to decide whether or not it's a good idea give up what I already have (just as the company gets to decide whether I am a good risk at my larger-than-novice pay rate).

I approve of the idea that companies and employees should mutually agree a probation period that is satisfactory to both - it seems to me that a one week period at first is a good idea.

I would be willing to give up a week of vacation time for this opportunity (if I thought it had a good chance of resulting in a positive outcome). If I was worried about the loss of vacation, I would explain this and ask the new employer to consider additional vacation - the result of this discussion would also be important in my consideration.

What if it doesn't work out? You show up to work the following Monday and ask for another week off to go check out another place?

OK, personally what would I do in that hypothetical situation?

Note that I would only take the trial week if I thought there was a good chance of it being a mutual match.

If it didn't work out despite that, then I would consider it a good investment of my time. Compared to starting a permanent contract and it not working out, it's a great outcome.

If I had several opportunities at that level of significance, then I would have already considered whether resignation from my existing job was an option.

My comment from the blog:

I've seen several variations of the "trial week" in effect on a smaller scale. In the cases I'm aware of, the timeframe was drastically reduced to a weekend or a single workday. Candidates were given a realistic problem to solve and a set amount of time to solve it. Most implementation details were left out beyond general scope and what constituted completion. If someone was truly interested in being hired for the company, they'd jump at the chance. Beyond this, I've also been in situations where the candidates were paid for their time, even on weekends. It's an incentive that the company is also investing themselves in the candidate. The company is essentially saying "We're interested enough in hiring you to pay you for your time." This bodes well with both parties in my experience.

So, I wonder what kind of people are getting hired by "interview" games? Are these interviewing techniques bringing in high-caliber people? Or are they bringing in the highest-caliber people they can bring in. Are you hiring people from well-established firms, or hiring people from companies that are just that much farther off.

I guess what I'm wondering is are the people applying doing so because of the opportunity to work on interesting challenges, or are they just people who have a worse job and really have nothing to lose by applying. I look at these week long games and wonder what incentive is there for someone in my position to apply?

It's useless to talk about numbers unless you also talk about results. And hiring 50% or 75% of people that jump through hoops is a useless number. If those same people are just people coming out from college or jumping from another startup, is the number really impressive?

My thought is no. The additional games seem more like over-compensation for a deficiency.

My comment from the blog:

Additional point: the candidate may not be able to work (paid) at another company for a week without breaking part of their contract, such as a "devotion" clause.

(For example, something like a "the Employee must not, without the Company's prior written consent, engage in any other employment or business activity" line in the contract.)

Do such contract stipulations ever actually hold up court or have been challenged?

Do you really want to hire someone who cares so little for agreements they sign in good faith?

You can't sign something unethical and immoral in good faith, by definition. You need a meeting of the minds on an equal playing field.

> something unethical and immoral

That sir, is your opinion and has no bearing on the legal definition of good faith.

There is nothing inherently evil about exclusive employment agreements for full time employees and is fair to both parties.

I'm only aware of one case challenging it, and it was a pretty specific context (a 1982 case [1] in which tenured professors challenged their university's ban on taking a second full-time job, which was upheld).

In general though these kinds of restrictions tend to be upheld unless there is a state law against them. There have occasionally been proposals that a robust "right to work" law should generally protect the right to form new contracts selling one's labor to a willing buyer, and void any exclusivity contracts with other parties that would interfere with that right. But in practice all states that I know of with a "right to work" law have adopted a much more limited version of the right, which only voids very specific kinds of exclusivity contracts (relating to employer–union contracts). Some states separately void noncompete agreements under a related principle.

I'm not aware of any state voiding contracts relating to exclusive employment with the employer for the duration of the contract, at least for full-time, salaried employees.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1733979708568541...

It is called a moonlighting policy, and I suspect they do hold up. Microsoft had that policy in place for decades. They didn't outright ban moonlighting, but you did need to have a formal agreement with your manager. I think they softened it a bit only to encourage employees to build apps for Windows Phone.

I say it probably does hold up because otherwise I am guessing they would have abandoned it. Microsoft has quite a bit of experience with labor dispute litigation. Having billions in cash is like chumming the water for labor law attorneys.

More importantly, you usually end up assigning the rights for your work product to your primary employer. So you can get yourself (or your moonlighting customers) into all sorts of trouble.

Reference: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/02/issues-with-emp.html

As a person currently interviewing with companies (student, graduating, etc.), I definitely wouldn't be able to commit to a week long trial process, even if paid, in the next 6-8 months. (Unless over Christmas/New Years; even the week long Spring break is nearly 6 months out.) I'm hoping (fingers crossed, etc.) that I'll have a job lined up in the next two months; I don't want to be looking for a job in 6-8.

Asking someone to drop everything for a week (particularly with what is likely a month of notice, if that, given how long hiring processes seem to take) seems ridiculously presumptuous about what people's motivations/etc. are. I'd imagine that many good candidates also just have other things in their life: such as responsibilities related to children. I know that I have a hard time re-arranging my responsibilities (to my grad classes, both part time jobs with very flexible hours, and to a lesser degree to extracurricular organizations) so that I'm free to spend a day or so travelling for a day long interview with a month's notice: and I'm a student with (supposedly) all the free time in the world and a much more flexible schedule. I don't see where working professionals with (supposedly) more rigid schedules and more obligations (work, sure, but also family or any other obligations in their lives) would find the time to spend a full week interviewing (assuming the weekend is spent travelling, so that the full work week is available).

After thinking it over, I don't really have a problem with a trial period. All employment agreements I've seen allow for a 3 month trial period already.

The only stipulation I'd add is that salary and benefits already be finalized. Someone taking a week away from their current job, or quitting it outright, has weakened their negotiation position so the paper work had better be done before the trial week starts.

Also I don't think too many companies would go down thsi trial road.... By definition if you are doing a 1 week trial period then you are excluding the top 5-10% of people from your potential set of hires as they'd never put up with this, but the companies that do this like Weebly don't need to hire the top 5-10% of hackers.

Weebly is probably content with hiring in the top 40% and therefore the system works for them.

The best interiew process I ever went through was pretty much like this. Of course they first check the CV, then a regular interview, and when that went well, I got a programming assignment. Something very simple, but in a framework I wasn't familiar with. Had about a week to do it in my own time, could contact them with questions, and at the end, I presented my code to the devs, who asked questions. Afterwards, the devs vote by email.

I haven't heard of a better way to do it yet.

I like this. Being able to do it in your own time relieves the pressure of being put on the spot and working in a foreign environment.

personally, i can see why people want this, but as an engineer i'd only do it if i was either pretty desperate (like, not having a job), or if there was a chance to learn something pretty cool. if the trial week were as interesting as, say, the matasano crypto challenge, then i'd do it even if i wasn't looking for a job. but i guess making something like that is difficult.

now i suspect most companies would like candidates who think that working there is "pretty cool" in itself. but let's be honest - jobs aren't like that. they have good bits and bad bits. and picking out just the good bits for a week, for someone who doesn't understand the context, is hard.

so it seems to me that there's a disadvantage to the company - they are discouraging people who are good enough to not be desperate and attract people who think that a typical job (sorry, but most are, by definition) is "pretty cool".

or maybe they just get younger, less cynical employees ;o)

Yeah I've considered doing this a bunch of times but my biggest problem is coming up with small chunks of work that require little-to-no domain knowledge and can be done in a day/weekend/week.

We've switched to having candidates do two take home problems that are derived from actual problems we faced and it's worked very well. It cuts down on the number of bad candidates that get to the office and waste an hour of time and it gives a chance to candidates who are good coders but bad whiteboarders.

Trial week, only if the company trials the payroll into my bank account for that week as well. Otherwise it would be illegal to work less than minimum wage in many countries unless registered charity.

Also ironicly for many who are unemployed - such an arrangement would legaly stop there benifits and in short place them into a dangerous position.

Fact is you already get a trial period - it is called probabtion period and with that it works both ways for early termination. Call it a cooling of period. This is how the legal system has such an arrangement to accomodate such setups and for a company to skip all that at the expense of the employee is moraly wrong.

Its an interesting article. I would have liked "66% Hire Rate Suggests Deeper Hiring Issue" to have been further explored before conclusions were drawn.

The article assumption was the amazing 1/3 failure rate must have been due to their highly unusual hiring practices. But when you hear hooves, think horses not zebras unless you've ruled out horses, which hasn't been done. Most hiring failures are management failures, or culture problems on either or both side, or moral/ethical problems, or simple logistics ...

My second and third job in IT had a trial period of 6 months, which is quite common here in Sweden.

Some people get to skip this depending on the contract they sign but I'm a high school drop out so I believe that's why I've always had to prove myself.

I find it perfectly acceptable to make sure that an employee knows what they're doing and get feedback from the whole team before 6 months are over.

In Netherland, the standard trial period is a month, during which you can be fired at any time for anything. I'm not sure it's legal to extend that trial period, but after that, people usually get a half-year contract, which won't get extended if it turns out they suck during that half year. There's a strict limit to how many temporary contracts you can get. Eventually, the employer has to offer a permanent contract. You can't let the employee live with that kind of uncertainty indefinitely.

This has been true of several places I've worked in the states, too - you're technically a contractor (e.g. no benefits) until the trial period is complete.

If you read the comments in the post, the company employees are saying that the majority of the people in trial week are from out of the area. This changes the story quite a bit.

If I were to offer you a position in a different city, you'd probably want to check out the city first. I offer to pay for your trip and I'll even put you up for a week, and you can even come work with us for a week, and I'll pay you for that too. Sounds great, or at least better than not being paid.

The risk in this situation isn't just the risk of hiring a new employee being mitigated by the company. It's also the risk of relocating to a new city, combined with taking a new job with a new company, being mitigated by the job seeker. When the company takes away much of that risk by paying for the trip, putting up the worker, and paying for the work being done during that trip, it takes away much of the risk for the job seeker.

I think there are many upsides:

- The candidate gets to know the company better.

- The company gets to know the candidate better.

- You can check for fit as well as technical competency.

Some of the downsides people raise make less sense:

- Yes it's a week of vacation lost, but you can get it back if you switch companies and you're paid for your time.

- Yes, it's expensive, but it's cheaper than a bad hire.

- It's entirely voluntary, there's no exploitation.

There's only two downsides in my mind: You won't be able to pry any superstars away with this, and sometimes a week isn't enough. The solution is to go further in the direction that this company is going - offers lots of real-work internships to college students. You need to identify the best while they're still sophomores and juniors. It's usually too tough to get them after they're seniors, and they're usually too happy in their jobs to take a week off to work somewhere else.

"There's only two downsides in my mind: You won't be able to pry any superstars away with this"

There is an unexplored dimension to this situation. If I understand the situation correctly, this is hiring at weebly. My impression is they're a 50 or so employee webhoster with an integrated custom CMS and a slick UI. They seem to be in maintain/upgrade mode rather than invent a product mode. They don't want or need a superstar. This is not a binary world, claiming they don't want or need a superstar does NOT imply I think they're dirtbags or losers, solely implying average people doing an average job at an average company doing very average and traditional business. Anyone vaguely near the median skill level would be a perfect fit and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I agree that their unusual hiring plan would be a horrible idea for a startup doing something new or challenging where they need high end skills. If they were developing their platform in, say, '96 they would have needed a superstar for the development phase. In 2013 during maintenance of an existing product, its the equivalent of stamping out license plates.

Filtering out "super stars" or "rock stars" might be a perfectly valid design goal of a hiring process where you don't want or need super stars. What would a "super star" do at a webhost in 2013 other than get really bored? The business model or UI or internal processes might be very innovative; that doesn't mean every job there is currently innovative. "Oh great, I get to maintain an existing CRUD app for the customer database, how cutting edge"

You're correct here. Superstars are expensive, and need certain types of roles to stay. If you don't have that offer, it's better to not design recruiting strategies around that.

Isn't most employment at-will essentially making it a "trial" of undetermined length?

In the US, in some places, yes.

The post's author is Australian, and is writing from that perspective. We have minimum legal notice periods from both sides (a week for the first year, evenutally going up to four weeks): http://www.fairwork.gov.au/TERMINATION/NOTICE-PERIODS/Pages/...

Yup, and you will discover the at-willness of your employment when you ask for a week of personal time. They will panic that you are running off to play some other founders little game.

In markets where employers have a lot of leverage, some employers do more or less do that. They hire more employees than they really need, then put in stringent screening practices to cut the ones they don't want to keep. There are a lot of crappy employers out there, who can get away with it because many people are not in an economic position to object.

In markets where employees have more leverage and can choose which employers to work for, using the legal right to fire people whenever you want to produce a trial period as a matter of routine is a good way to get a bad reputation. If a company is known for firing 30% of its hires within the first 6 months, many people with options will choose another option. Or at least, they will have to be much more attractive in other ways to make up for it (higher pay, more interesting work, etc.). If that's really the intent, making it officially a trial week up front is a lot more transparent.

Only in some countries. In many countries, workers do have rights and can't be fired trivially.

Yes, but good employers have enough respect for their employees as humans that they want to avoid hiring and then firing someone at all costs.

Not to mention, a company that routinely fires new employees after just a week or two would probably get a bad reputation pretty quickly. Unless they're Facebook (which supposedly does/did this in six week intervals), they probably would take a severe hit on the quality of applicants in the end.

But hold on, didn’t I mention one week is not enough for a candidate to be productive and effective? Yes! And that’s why most places have a three-month probation.

If I had to change jobs, I'd be MUCH more comfortable taking a week's vacation, doing a "trial" week, and then making a decision than I would making the decision and then being subjected to a three-month probationary period.

The trial weeks let's both parties dip their toes in the water. I think for many employees, it reduces their risk quite a bit. If it doesn't work out, you're out a week's vacation. If you're three month probation doesn't work out, you're out of a job altogether.

Probation in the article's context is mostly an artifact of Australia's Fair Work Act and not being an at-will employment country.

For the probationary period the employer can fire you for almost any reason (like in the US) but afterwards there's a procedure involved where the employer has to show cause and give the employee a chance to rectify the issues before dismissal.

It's not like a trial week that last 3 months, it's more regular employment but you receive tenure (or a sort) after 3 months.

As it is with every market out there, it is a matter of equilibrium between buyers and sellers.

Sure you can find enough people to do a trial week if you are a poster child of startups. Good luck if you are anything less than that.

Yay for Tesla Inc.; Nay for vowelless.ly

For the moment, yes; it's an employees' market right now.

What I hate to think about is what happen when the pendulum starts swinging back. My partner is in print design, and most companies seem to put candidates through onerous application procedures because they can.

If you'd like to experience the future, today, simply look for a job outside SV, NYC, or maybe Austin.

This is part of why the fizzbuzz test sounds so funny away from the coasts. If the supply-demand dynamic is such that you "have to" interview any warm body that applies, you need a fizzbuzz test. If the supply-demand dynamic is such that the entire workforce is ridiculously overeducated and overexperienced for the job, you only need fizzbuzz if you're trying to bottom feed (only offering $12/hr 1099 no benefits, that kind of thing)

I wish I had more than one upvote for this. As somebody in Dallas my job searches over the past five years have been a hell of arbitrary, narrow requirements lists and lack of interest in anything I have done that is not professional work.

To make things worse, I can't get SV companies to give me the time of day. They all seem to be focused on poaching "rock stars" from each other and operating under the arrogant assumption[1] that anyone worth a damn has already moved there because, duh, everyone wants to be here.

[1] An assumption I have seen voiced here and elsewhere, and can probably dig up the references if I try hard enough.

I would suspect that the main people interested would be the desperate ones - this isn't going to attract the best & brightest, who know what they're about and don't need to waste their time on something like this.

So in short, nay.

If they are hiring 66% of people that go through "trial week", it appears as if the decision to hire was already fairly well established before the candidate had to endure trial week. No company would be bragging about a 66% hire rate on all candidates, as that would show you are probably not very selective at all (assuming the applicants represent the industry as a whole).

They don't provide data as to how many interviews they do before the invite, or what percentage of candidates are invited to participate in trial week. I'd imagine that, if this company is truly selective, the percentage of candidates invited to trial week is rather low - well below 50%, probably closer to 10%.

If they are hiring 66% of the candidates that make it through trial week, and only 5% of candidates are rejecting the opportunity for a trial week, then how much value does the trial week actually add? One could argue that the cost of wasting an entire week with the 34% of candidates that you aren't going to hire is substantial (while most here could argue that you could end up getting some great ideas on the process out of that candidate even if you don't hire him/her).

And who is to say that the 34% wouldn't have worked out in the long run? They provide an anecdote about a candidate that didn't handle interview pressure well but did great during trial week. Couldn't at least some percentage of the 34% that are rejected perhaps feel that same pressure in trial week, and could do well when the guise of an audition is no longer present?

But if you have a 66% positive rate on trial week, it seems the main purpose it serves is to just verify what you already know - that you want to hire this person. But it also serves, perhaps, a more important purpose as well.

What I think is the true secret sauce here is the concept related to the willingness of candidates to participate in the process. One of the hiring criteria is a clear interest in the company and a belief in the product. If someone is willing to jump through this kind of hoop at the chance to work for this company, they are either very interested in the company or desperate for any job. That 5% that reject the trial week can be deemed not a fit, due to their unwillingness to jump through this hoop.

What about the same 'trial' concept, except limit it to possibly 2 days, like a Friday and a Saturday. Assuming the company is small, it might even be possible to do Saturday/Sunday. I'd also let the interviewee choose which weekend is best for him/her.

I like the idea of a trial since I do believe interviews are a limited window of analysis, but I agree with Fred's points–asking anyone with a current job to take a week off is not reasonable.

The problem is not even that top people will not bother. The problem is that other companies hiring the same person will have a week on you.

If your candidate has any value to your competition you just left him or her on the market for additional 1 week plus how many weeks it takes to schedule yours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com