Following other commenters here, I’m heavily pro work tests, but always advocate strongly for (what I believe to be) fair compensation. If organisations are having you do major unpaid (or e.g. minimum-wage) work trials, that seems like a serious problem.
There are also two broad categories of paid work tests I’ve seen, and I think the distinction between them is important:
The first is standardised “trial tasks”, in which every candidate is given an identical task that functions like an exam. These are typically purely for assessment and have little to no practical benefit to the organisation; they also typically come earlier in the process.
The second is an on-the-ground “work trial” in which the candidate works closely with members of the hiring org over one to a few days. These trials more commonly involve work that’s useful to the organisation, since the goal is to see how the candidate works in a more realistic setting with their potential new teammates. These typically come later in the process.
In my opinion, both of these should be paid, with the importance of providing payment increasing with the length and arduousness of the trial. I also think (2) should only be used with a small number of finalist candidates the org is genuinely excited about. If an org is instead giving these kinds of trials to significant numbers of candidates with lower probability of hiring, then I agree that seems quite problematic, especially if the trials aren’t fairly compensated (the need for fair compensation also creates an incentive to be selective with the candidates that get asked to take a trial, which I think is helpful for reducing the concerns raised here).
On (1), the organization needs to clearly explain that this is a task that is used for assessment and that the organization will not benefit from the task. Otherwise, the candidate will likely walk away feeling used, and may share information about the trial task with others (why wouldn’t they if they were not aware it was a standardized instrument that will be reused?)
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. Obviously, one should be more selective with invitations to more time-consuming and arduous trials.
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.
Following other commenters here, I’m heavily pro work tests, but always advocate strongly for (what I believe to be) fair compensation. If organisations are having you do major unpaid (or e.g. minimum-wage) work trials, that seems like a serious problem.
There are also two broad categories of paid work tests I’ve seen, and I think the distinction between them is important:
The first is standardised “trial tasks”, in which every candidate is given an identical task that functions like an exam. These are typically purely for assessment and have little to no practical benefit to the organisation; they also typically come earlier in the process.
The second is an on-the-ground “work trial” in which the candidate works closely with members of the hiring org over one to a few days. These trials more commonly involve work that’s useful to the organisation, since the goal is to see how the candidate works in a more realistic setting with their potential new teammates. These typically come later in the process.
In my opinion, both of these should be paid, with the importance of providing payment increasing with the length and arduousness of the trial. I also think (2) should only be used with a small number of finalist candidates the org is genuinely excited about. If an org is instead giving these kinds of trials to significant numbers of candidates with lower probability of hiring, then I agree that seems quite problematic, especially if the trials aren’t fairly compensated (the need for fair compensation also creates an incentive to be selective with the candidates that get asked to take a trial, which I think is helpful for reducing the concerns raised here).
On (1), the organization needs to clearly explain that this is a task that is used for assessment and that the organization will not benefit from the task. Otherwise, the candidate will likely walk away feeling used, and may share information about the trial task with others (why wouldn’t they if they were not aware it was a standardized instrument that will be reused?)
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. Obviously, one should be more selective with invitations to more time-consuming and arduous trials.
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.