Work trials (paid, obviously) are awesome for better hiring, especially if you’re seeking to get good candidates that don’t fulfill the traditional criteria (e.g. coming from an elite US/UK university). Many job seekers don’t have a current employment.
Living with other EAs or your coworkers is mostly fine too, especially if you’re in a normal living situation, like most EA group houses are.
These suggestions aren’t great. I agree with the “Don’t date” ones, but these were already argued for before.
In general, I think it is helpful in discussing work trials if people (including the OP) distinguished between three different things that are commonly called work trials:
Take-home trial tasks / timed online tests, which typically take somewhere in the region of 2-8 hours and are designed to be doable on a weekend or otherwise without work disruption.
Short (usually 1-3-day) work trials prior to receiving a job offer. This is what I usually think of as being referred to by the term “work trial”. While it’s technically true that these “interruption of regular employment to complete” (quote from OP) I think it’s generally pretty manageable to make this work by taking e.g. 1-2 days of vacation.
Long (often several months) “work trials” that essentially act as extended paid probation. I’ve seen these at a few EA orgs and sometimes feel iffy about them, but IMO they’re not all that different from standard probation practices in the US. They definitely require “those currently employed full-time [to] leave their existing job”, though.
I’m not sure which of these the OP was including in her claim. Presumably not the first one?
Thank you for listing these out; I think it’s helpful to show that there are a range of work trial options with different levels of intensity and potential sacrifice on the part of the prospective employee.
I was thinking more in the category of #3. To be clear, I don’t think probationary employment is necessarily a bad thing. What I have seen though is a growing norm of work trials of one to three months. This seems to hit a particularly problematic middle ground of requiring a candidate to leave other employment and failing to guarantee medium-term job security. I think this is bad for a number of reasons, including making it less likely that employed people will apply for positions and consequently limiting the skilled applicant pool. It also creates a culture of precarity that I don’t think should be a requirement for someone securing their “dream job” in EA.
Thanks for clarifying, I agree category #3 is the most dicey of the three.
How do you see these trials as differing from standard probation? Is it that the chance of a no-hire at the end is higher? Or the length? Or something else?
I agree that work trials are a different category—and seem ok to me.
It’s not an abuse of power dynamics or anything like that.
If you demand work trials (or various other things) - you will get less candidates, but it’s ok, it’s a tradeoff you as an employer can chose to do when nobody is dependent on you, people can just chose not to apply.
TLDR: I think you are right, it is generally fine.
I do a lot of thinking about hiring, so I’ll chime in here. I think that work trials (work sample tests that are used to evaluate a candidate’s skills during a hiring process) have plenty of potential for abuse, but generally work fine the way that EA orgs tend to do them. Off the top of my head, the main aspects that I would look at to make a judgement if it is fine or not (setting aside fairness/justice/accessibility aspects, and just focusing on power/exploitation dynamics):
Time required. A lot of useful skills don’t need 4 or 5 hours to be evaluated. My hypothesis (currently untested) is that most work trials could be 45 minutes or less.
Payment given. This is pretty clear: giving someone money in exchange for work seems more reasonable and less exploitative than asking someone do do some work for free.
Whether it is piece of real work. The worst version would just be to find a discrete chunk of work and have a job applicant do that. When combined with not being paid, this is the most obviously exploitative thing, because a company can literally just use candidates as free labor for any discrete tasks.
Respect/communication. This is a bit more fuzzy, but the mental model I have of the bad version of this is a candidate submitting a piece of work into the void and never hearing anything back. The best version of this involves feedback on what the candidate did well and what went poorly.
Work trials (paid, obviously) are awesome for better hiring, especially if you’re seeking to get good candidates that don’t fulfill the traditional criteria (e.g. coming from an elite US/UK university). Many job seekers don’t have a current employment.
Living with other EAs or your coworkers is mostly fine too, especially if you’re in a normal living situation, like most EA group houses are.
These suggestions aren’t great. I agree with the “Don’t date” ones, but these were already argued for before.
In general, I think it is helpful in discussing work trials if people (including the OP) distinguished between three different things that are commonly called work trials:
Take-home trial tasks / timed online tests, which typically take somewhere in the region of 2-8 hours and are designed to be doable on a weekend or otherwise without work disruption.
Short (usually 1-3-day) work trials prior to receiving a job offer. This is what I usually think of as being referred to by the term “work trial”. While it’s technically true that these “interruption of regular employment to complete” (quote from OP) I think it’s generally pretty manageable to make this work by taking e.g. 1-2 days of vacation.
Long (often several months) “work trials” that essentially act as extended paid probation. I’ve seen these at a few EA orgs and sometimes feel iffy about them, but IMO they’re not all that different from standard probation practices in the US. They definitely require “those currently employed full-time [to] leave their existing job”, though.
I’m not sure which of these the OP was including in her claim. Presumably not the first one?
Thank you for listing these out; I think it’s helpful to show that there are a range of work trial options with different levels of intensity and potential sacrifice on the part of the prospective employee.
I was thinking more in the category of #3. To be clear, I don’t think probationary employment is necessarily a bad thing. What I have seen though is a growing norm of work trials of one to three months. This seems to hit a particularly problematic middle ground of requiring a candidate to leave other employment and failing to guarantee medium-term job security. I think this is bad for a number of reasons, including making it less likely that employed people will apply for positions and consequently limiting the skilled applicant pool. It also creates a culture of precarity that I don’t think should be a requirement for someone securing their “dream job” in EA.
Thanks for clarifying, I agree category #3 is the most dicey of the three.
How do you see these trials as differing from standard probation? Is it that the chance of a no-hire at the end is higher? Or the length? Or something else?
I agree that work trials are a different category—and seem ok to me.
It’s not an abuse of power dynamics or anything like that.
If you demand work trials (or various other things) - you will get less candidates, but it’s ok, it’s a tradeoff you as an employer can chose to do when nobody is dependent on you, people can just chose not to apply.
No?
@Rockwell
P.S
I sometimes try helping orgs with hiring so I’m very interested in noticing if I’m wrong here
TLDR: I think you are right, it is generally fine.
I do a lot of thinking about hiring, so I’ll chime in here. I think that work trials (work sample tests that are used to evaluate a candidate’s skills during a hiring process) have plenty of potential for abuse, but generally work fine the way that EA orgs tend to do them. Off the top of my head, the main aspects that I would look at to make a judgement if it is fine or not (setting aside fairness/justice/accessibility aspects, and just focusing on power/exploitation dynamics):
Time required. A lot of useful skills don’t need 4 or 5 hours to be evaluated. My hypothesis (currently untested) is that most work trials could be 45 minutes or less.
Payment given. This is pretty clear: giving someone money in exchange for work seems more reasonable and less exploitative than asking someone do do some work for free.
Whether it is piece of real work. The worst version would just be to find a discrete chunk of work and have a job applicant do that. When combined with not being paid, this is the most obviously exploitative thing, because a company can literally just use candidates as free labor for any discrete tasks.
Respect/communication. This is a bit more fuzzy, but the mental model I have of the bad version of this is a candidate submitting a piece of work into the void and never hearing anything back. The best version of this involves feedback on what the candidate did well and what went poorly.