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.
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.