I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.
This eliminates everyone currently employed but looking for another job from your hiring process. Seems like you're severely limiting yourselves with this tactic.
Being employed also makes candidates more attractive. If you don’t have many resources, why waste them trying to compete for the same subset of the pool of good candidates as everyone else when you can get better efficiency going for the candidates which the competition undervalues?
That seems like a very self-defeating attitude; sure, maybe your pay isn't at FAANG levels, but maybe something else about your company (less demanding hours, better benefits, generous vacation, tuition assistance, better business practices, better development practices, etc.) will attract a candidate. Maybe they're someone transitioning out of a different field but they have the skills you need (I'm self-taught and worked as a mechanical engineer before I was hired as a developer, for example).
You don't have to compete on pay to attract good talent, but refusing to compete on the least amount of time wasted will only attract people with a certain set of life circumstances that have no bearing on their skillset.
I think I did a poor job of explaining myself above, so let me try again.
If one accepts the premise of the OP that typical interviewing processes are bad at identifying good recruits, and if one believes the trends implied by eg hiring behaviours of big companies and some hn comments, then that implies:
- there is some subset of candidates who are attractive to big companies and those companies mostly compete with each other for those candidates.
- there are candidates who would make good hires who are (incorrectly) identified as uninteresting by these large companies
And so:
- if you are better at identifying people who would make good hires than the big companies, you will be able to hire people big companies would overlook.
- on average your offers are more likely to be accepted by people with fewer offers by big companies (even if you can pay as well or better this is still true because if a candidate has more options they may choose one that isn’t yours for reasons you can’t control)
- so your recruiting will be more cost-effective (in terms of spending less resources finding candidates and, optionally, paying new hires less) if your process mostly finds people who are (a) likely good hires and (b) more likely to accept your offer (because they don’t have so many options).
If one believes that the toplevel poster in this thread finds good candidates by having week-long trial periods then one should also expect this process to be more cost-efficient as it naturally selects for candidates who are less likely to be competed for by other companies (because those companies mistakenly think that unemployed people are unemployable)
You don’t need to pay those people less; the cost being optimised for here could be the internal resources spent on the hiring process which can be high even if you have large teams.
I think one thing I struggled with for a while was that I implicitly felt that companies ought to be designing recruiting processes that could fairly identify any candidate who would be a good employee, but really it is sufficient for a company to come up with a process that gets sufficiently many hires at a reasonable cost and doing things like reducing the applicant pool with arbitrary restrictions like job history or pedigree may reduce the cost of applying the later stages (because they would be applied to fewer people) even if it increases the salary they are hired at (because eg they are using the same arbitrary restrictions as many other companies).
