asking people to do a one-week work trial before offering them the job

A reader writes:

I saw an ad for a job at a company that says they ask candidates to spend 3-5 paid days working with them before they’ll make an offer. Their ads reads, “Spending 3-5 days in person working together on a real problem is so much higher signal than interviews could ever produce.” They also say that almost every candidate they hire says they love the experience and wouldn’t want to take a job without a work trial in the future because they learned so much about how the organization operates.

Curious for your thoughts on this. It seems like a great way to screen for desperate folks without current jobs? Or is it just obvious rage-bait?

Well, on one hand, of course you learn more about candidates by working with them for five days (and they learn more about you) than you do in an interview. In a vacuum, it makes perfect sense! Some people interview really well but aren’t so good once you see them on the job. And from the candidate’s point of view, some managers sound great in an interview and turn out to be nightmares once you’re on the job.

The problem, though, is that our system isn’t set up for this. It’s not realistic for most people to be able to take off three to five days from their job (out of whatever limited vacation time they have for the year), and possibly on short notice, to do this. If someone is unemployed, it gets easier — but a ton of candidates will have to have jobs, and this isn’t a reasonable expectation to put on them.

Plus, imagine that lots of companies started doing this, and that you’d have to do multiple work trials before one ended in an offer. You could easily blow through your full amount of vacation time for the year, or even exceed it, just doing work trials.

I do think it’s a great idea, for some jobs, to ask finalists at the very end of the process to complete a sample work project and pay them for it. I’ve done that before, and you learn a ton that you didn’t necessarily see in the interview and it can really differentiate your best candidates. But that’s a much lower burden than asking someone to spend a week with you.

Interviews aren’t a perfect system — far from it. But week-long work trials aren’t a reasonable solution for most people.

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