Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

tldr:

"The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship."

Or they can just walk down the street and get a job anywhere else with similar compensation with less contortion.

The people who will go through this either a) really want to work at your particular company (in which case, great, but unlikely), or b) are desperate for a job because they've been turned down several times.

That would violate many people's current employment contracts that either forbid them from working for someone else simultaneously, or that assert ownership of all code written outside of work.

That sounds like it would scale well for the applicant.

It works well in my experience, but we have only used it at smaller scale. 2-3 days working together with somebody is already way more telling than stupid interviews, buzzword compliant skillsets and unrealistic tests.

How would it work in "your experience" if you were the job seeker and not the interviewer? Taking a week of PTO to interview and then not get the job is a pretty big sunk cost. I guess you can only do one of these a year.

We paid them the equivalent of well-paid consulting work for the time they worked with us, so I would be fine with that.

If you make weekends and evenings available, it lessens the cost of the job seeker. If you allow for remote work using one of the many online collaboration tools, it lessens the cost for both the job seeker and the employer.

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