What I find disturbing about this is that lean concepts, from Deming to Toyota to software dev and so forth, is meant to benefit both the company and the customer — reduce waste, increase flow, make products and services that people want and that make companies money.

"Lean recruitment" is a bastardization of the term, as it's basically a cool-sounding way for companies to exploit job-seekers in a way that doesn't make things better for the job seeker but certainly advantages the company.

Company gets some free (which may be illegal in some jurisdictions) or paid-but-still-illegal (just saying "independent contractor" isn't a magic word) labor and a low-cost way to vet candidates. Job-seekers get ... an opportunity to work in a diminished capacity in the hopes of getting a job. And no, calling someone an "independent contractor" doesn't necessarily make it so, if the person is doing work in the office, under your direction, with your equipment — companies get in trouble calling people independent contractors when they're actually employees. The description from the original post certainly sounds like it fits this pretty well.

I don't think the current interview process is working as well as it could, and it's ripe for some rebooting. But I don't see that labelling "worker exploitation" as "lean" gets us there.