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Comment by flipactual | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know what your work-sample looks like, but unless it’s time actually working with your team on a real project, it gave you no indication of whether or not someone was “capable of delivering”

You may think you filtered out people who failed your test, but you have no indication that that’s the case – you could just as easily have filtered out people who don’t like tests or people who don’t test well

I trust you’ve found some decent hires, but I’d suspect you passed on many as well

And, I don’t know about your work environment, but I’d prefer someone who can have a friendly conversation and do good work... I’m surprised you bothered giving your work-sample test to people who didn’t pass the earlier test

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> but unless it’s time actually working with your team on a real project..

I've ranted about this before on HN, but that's very much illegal in my neck of the woods. As soon as someone does useful work for you, they're an employee. YMMV but you can't expect new candidates to do actual work until you've hired them.

There are plenty of programming assignments, exercises or questions you can have them do instead.

So have a basic filter, hire based on who meshes well with the team and have a trial period during which they actually get evaluated for competence. They’re technically an employee during the trial period, but with the understanding (and contractual agreement) that they will be evaluated at the end of the period and that the employment will be terminated if they do not meet the criteria.

Trial periods, too, are no longer allowed over here. They used to be permissible up to 6 months (which was an insanely long time to essentially live with the knowledge that you could basically be sacked any day). But now they're gone. Firing people isn't terribly easy either, might need to give two months notice!

Of course, the net result is that self-employed contracting is on the rise. Especially the kind where people are self-employed only in name, but really work for a single employer. The only difference is that they send an invoice at the end of the month, and the employer can terminate the contract at any point (depending on the terms in the contract, of course).

Hiring is hard. Especially so when hiring the wrong person can cost you two months' wages.

> Trial periods, too, are no longer allowed over here.

Ouch. That does make it really hard, impossible even, to make sure you get a good fit.

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