Remember—you can request hiring managers complete work tasks for you as part of a job application.
If work tasks are so good at filtering for quality applicants, it should work in reverse. Set the hiring manager a time-bound task and gauge based on their responses whether you think they’re a good fit for you.
Think of all the things that are important to you as an employee and bake those into the test.
If they don’t do the test, then you probably shouldn’t work for them.
How many times have you requested a hiring manager do a work test for you? For what types of roles? Did you compensate them for their time?
The basic employment relationship is:
Firm pays wages.
Employee does work.
This is asymmetric because the firm’s obligations are typically very fixed: they have to pay exactly $X every two weeks or they will get in a lot of trouble very quickly. In contrast, what is demanded from employees is typically a lot more nebulous. The firm can’t easily know how talented the candidates are, or how hard they will work. If the perform badly it is costly to replace them. So a work test provides them useful information.
This isn’t the complete analysis. The interview process is often two-way, especially for positions where the employees success will depend on the success of the team. But asking the hiring manager to do a two hour task is probably not going to give you very much useful information about that.
This is as simple as, employers have more power than employees. Customers have more power than suppliers. Granters have more power than grantees. And so forth. Not in every case, but in almost all cases.
Is this unjust? Could we imagine a world where things were otherwise? Perhaps. But there are many injustices in the world, and we have to prioritize.
“employers have more power than employees”—I think what this is revealing is that I’m operating from a position of extreme priviledge, as I don’t feel this way at all.
It’s not that people don’t like it, it’s that they don’t think it’s true—you’re asserting something about how the world already works which seems clearly false
Interesting. So you’re saying you don’t think it is true that you could ask your next prospective employer to do a task for you as part of the interview process?
Not if you want the interview process to actually continue (or the “task” is “can we have a 5 minute chat so I can prepare for Wednesday’s interview”)
And if I was such a strong candidate for a particular job that employers were willing to devote lots of extra time to keeping me in the process, I think I’d rather use that to negotiate more money, responsibility or better working arrangements than set my future line manager a writing assignment...
Remember—you can request hiring managers complete work tasks for you as part of a job application.
If work tasks are so good at filtering for quality applicants, it should work in reverse. Set the hiring manager a time-bound task and gauge based on their responses whether you think they’re a good fit for you.
Think of all the things that are important to you as an employee and bake those into the test.
If they don’t do the test, then you probably shouldn’t work for them.
How many times have you requested a hiring manager do a work test for you? For what types of roles? Did you compensate them for their time?
The basic employment relationship is:
Firm pays wages.
Employee does work.
This is asymmetric because the firm’s obligations are typically very fixed: they have to pay exactly $X every two weeks or they will get in a lot of trouble very quickly. In contrast, what is demanded from employees is typically a lot more nebulous. The firm can’t easily know how talented the candidates are, or how hard they will work. If the perform badly it is costly to replace them. So a work test provides them useful information.
This isn’t the complete analysis. The interview process is often two-way, especially for positions where the employees success will depend on the success of the team. But asking the hiring manager to do a two hour task is probably not going to give you very much useful information about that.
I’ve not done it before, but if I was hiring and a strong candidate asked me to do it, I would!
This is as simple as, employers have more power than employees. Customers have more power than suppliers. Granters have more power than grantees. And so forth. Not in every case, but in almost all cases.
Is this unjust? Could we imagine a world where things were otherwise? Perhaps. But there are many injustices in the world, and we have to prioritize.
“employers have more power than employees”—I think what this is revealing is that I’m operating from a position of extreme priviledge, as I don’t feel this way at all.
I’d be very interested in why people don’t like this idea!
It’s not that people don’t like it, it’s that they don’t think it’s true—you’re asserting something about how the world already works which seems clearly false
Interesting. So you’re saying you don’t think it is true that you could ask your next prospective employer to do a task for you as part of the interview process?
Not if you want the interview process to actually continue (or the “task” is “can we have a 5 minute chat so I can prepare for Wednesday’s interview”)
And if I was such a strong candidate for a particular job that employers were willing to devote lots of extra time to keeping me in the process, I think I’d rather use that to negotiate more money, responsibility or better working arrangements than set my future line manager a writing assignment...
That’s correct