Otherwise, the candidate will likely walk away feeling used, and may share information about the trial task with others
We generally try to be pretty clear that this is a standardised test, yeah. Including asking people not to share it with others.
I have mixed feelings about being “selective with the candidates that get asked to take a trial”—if you weight performance on the trial very highly, then trimming the number of candidates able to take a trial denies people who may have scored very well (but whose resume is middle-of-the-road) a chance to prove themselves.
I agree that this is a tradeoff—one that is made sharper by the expense of paying fairly for trial tasks (if we didn’t pay, we could have a lower bar for sending out trial tasks). I think it’s fairly common to try to address this by having multiple trial tasks / work trials of increasing length & selectivity. (Though this has its own cost, namely an unusually lengthy and gruelling application process.)
Do all candidates necessarily start at the same stage of trial tasks in most organizations? I could imagine a very short “stage 0” trial task requested only from candidates who would be on the bubble of moving on to the first, moderately time-consuming task if there were no “stage 0“ task to evaluate. The “stage 0” task would only need enough power to tip someone on the bubble over into either the “it’s respectful to ask them to do a more demanding task” or “respect their time and move on” buckets. Of course, you’d need to find a quick “stage 0” task that correlates well enough with either job performance or later-stage test performance.
We generally try to be pretty clear that this is a standardised test, yeah. Including asking people not to share it with others.
I agree that this is a tradeoff—one that is made sharper by the expense of paying fairly for trial tasks (if we didn’t pay, we could have a lower bar for sending out trial tasks). I think it’s fairly common to try to address this by having multiple trial tasks / work trials of increasing length & selectivity. (Though this has its own cost, namely an unusually lengthy and gruelling application process.)
Do all candidates necessarily start at the same stage of trial tasks in most organizations? I could imagine a very short “stage 0” trial task requested only from candidates who would be on the bubble of moving on to the first, moderately time-consuming task if there were no “stage 0“ task to evaluate. The “stage 0” task would only need enough power to tip someone on the bubble over into either the “it’s respectful to ask them to do a more demanding task” or “respect their time and move on” buckets. Of course, you’d need to find a quick “stage 0” task that correlates well enough with either job performance or later-stage test performance.