It's certainly a hoop if you're already employed and have a multitude of options that I would presume the best and the brightest all do. It can come across as nonsense because if I'm good and know I'm good, I'd expect any potential employers to be able to recognize that easily without a trial period. And it certainly reflects a fear of commitment, warranted or not. I'm not sure why any in-demand developer would subject himself to that kind of trial period - not only is it against the terms of most employement agreements, it represents disproportionate commitment to a single job lead, which may be better spent on interviewing and receiving other offers. You, as an employer, are not special and the best and the brighest recognize that.
I don't think it works well as a filter either - a technical interview can easily assess capabilities and while you're right that it cannot accurately assess work ethic or motivation, a trial period cannot either! A desperate candidate during a trial period is generally going to behave very differently than he would a year down the road when he feels bored and the job is secure in his mind. Is it a better filter in a vacuum? If you start with the same sample of candidates, all of whom had to go through whatever process you devise, would a trial period make it easier for you to find the best candidates? Of course. But having such a process significantly skews your candidate pool to the desperate. That's not necessarily a wrong approach to recruiting, but it has nothing to do with hiring the best and the brightest. In addition, unless you're extremely careful, you'll be mostly judging candidates based on their familiarity with your technology stack and workflow, as opposed to long-term potential because that's what short-term productivity depends upon.
It may not apply to you in particular, but one other thing that would make me worry about a trial period is that it's indicative of two other personal flaws on the part of the hiring manager - he may be 1) indecisive and 2) technically incompetent. The indecisiveness part is obvious - not only is not being able to hire without a trial period a mark of indecisiveness by itself, it's also a hedge against future indecisiveness in getting rid of employees that don't work out. I also find that technically competent people can judge competence in others very well, very quickly. They aren't always right and there are qualities that only manifest over a longer period of time, but those qualities can't be judged in a few days of work.
"How do you be a good angel investor? The first thing you need is to be decisive. When we talk to founders about good and bad investors, one of the ways we describe the good ones is to say "he writes checks." That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Far from it. It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. You may be thinking, how hard could that be? You'll see when you try it. It follows from the nature of angel investing that the decisions are hard. You have to guess early, at the stage when the most promising ideas still seem counterintuitive, because if they were obviously good, VCs would already have funded them."
Stringing people along while not being able to make up their mind is what mediocre investors and VCs do - without seeing good evidence to the contrary, I'd guess that this applies to employers as well.
Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I'm not saying the approach is wrong or doesn't work or anything along those lines, merely that it's not how you hire the best and the brightest. Now, it's possible he meant "the best and the brightest" in the cliched way where everyone thinks they hire the best and the brightest, in which case it's fine. But in a literal sense, if your organization needs the best and the brightest, you won't get it following those suggestions.
Edit2: the point of pg's advice isn't that being decisive somehow is correlated with risk-taking and thus higher returns. The point is that being indecisive doesn't lead to significantly better decisions and if you can't make decisions quickly, you won't get the very best deals. If you're known to be indecisive or advertise this up front, no one who can get other investors will come to you. This is absolutely the case for talent.
Cultural fit is not a good reason either. If you can't judge whether someone fits in during the interview, you're probably not going to figure that out during the trial period during which you have a desperate person desperately trying to fit in. What's worse, this very mindset of "let's hire people who fit in" leads to the worst culture. If culture matters to you, hire people who are different.
And yes, finding good engineers, regardless of cultural fit, is by far the hardest problem. If you're optimizing for cultural fit and you're not Google/Facebook-type talent magnet, you're not even in the competition for the best talent. This may be fine if your bar is low - and let's face it, almost everyone's is - but again we're no longer talking about the best and the brightest.
>It can come across as nonsense because if I'm good and know I'm good, I'd expect any potential employers to be able to recognize that easily without a trial period.
I can only speak for startup / small team hiring, but the problem I see here is that the only hiring metric that you seem to be testing for is if the person is a good engineer or not. I believe that is rather objective, and in these days pretty clear to assess with the plethora of people writing open source projects. Simply put, if I was recruiting, I would not have contacted if I didn't believe you weren't capable of the work. (I also have the same problem with "Traditional" interviews, inviting a person for a job then testing them with fizzbuzz is like hiring an athlete to join your sports team, and on the first day asking him if he can kick a ball.)
What really worries me - and why I'm more a fan of a trial period, is how do you, as a human being, fit inside our community. Other than "not being able to do the work" there are a million other reasons why someone would not enjoy, or atleast put up their place of work. Maybe the team always has 6 o clock beers, and you don't drink so you feel left out. Maybe the team are composed of entirely of Montagues and you are a Capulet. There are human factors in the work place, and I believe, everyone should be comfortable where they work - and despite talks of equality, openness, and acceptance, there are people that just plain can't get along with other people for whatever reason. Were human and we move on.
Now again, I'm trying to build a small startup team and it might be different in corporate. However what would you say to employers that are looking at "trial period" hiring as a way to gauge culture fit and ultimately employee happiness?
Hiring employees is not angel investing. You want to minimize risk, not maximize it. VCs and angels are in the business of assuming massive amounts of risk.
In that case, your goal isn't to hire the best developers, but good enough. You're managing risk. Perfectly valid, but not what the article was titled.
This is a nonsensical comparison. If you were truly "angel investing" in your employees, you would be there at birth handing out shares. Or maybe "series A" would be recruiting them at their high school graduation.
I make no statement if you're angel investing in your employees or not -- I'm not even sure what that means.
All I'm saying is that if, as a business, you are seeking to minimize your risk portfolio during hiring you are, by definition, not seeking to hire the "best" employees, but to hire the best employees with the lowest risk profile.
Once again, I don't think this is bad. You're running a business and the task is to get the highest probability you'll hire a productive employee.
Nonetheless, the OP has a point that you may lose employees due to your risk tolerance being too low.
Example: I work on the C# compiler. I'm not going to take a prospective employer's "knowledge test" on C#, regardless of if that is statistically a good filter for them in hiring.
Every form of interview looses someone. If you follow that argument to the end the best interviewing process is waiting until you have a few candidates, throw a dice, hire the lucky one, dismiss the other candidates.
I don't think it works well as a filter either - a technical interview can easily assess capabilities and while you're right that it cannot accurately assess work ethic or motivation, a trial period cannot either! A desperate candidate during a trial period is generally going to behave very differently than he would a year down the road when he feels bored and the job is secure in his mind. Is it a better filter in a vacuum? If you start with the same sample of candidates, all of whom had to go through whatever process you devise, would a trial period make it easier for you to find the best candidates? Of course. But having such a process significantly skews your candidate pool to the desperate. That's not necessarily a wrong approach to recruiting, but it has nothing to do with hiring the best and the brightest. In addition, unless you're extremely careful, you'll be mostly judging candidates based on their familiarity with your technology stack and workflow, as opposed to long-term potential because that's what short-term productivity depends upon.
It may not apply to you in particular, but one other thing that would make me worry about a trial period is that it's indicative of two other personal flaws on the part of the hiring manager - he may be 1) indecisive and 2) technically incompetent. The indecisiveness part is obvious - not only is not being able to hire without a trial period a mark of indecisiveness by itself, it's also a hedge against future indecisiveness in getting rid of employees that don't work out. I also find that technically competent people can judge competence in others very well, very quickly. They aren't always right and there are qualities that only manifest over a longer period of time, but those qualities can't be judged in a few days of work.
Paul Graham's advice to investors is apt here:
http://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html
"How do you be a good angel investor? The first thing you need is to be decisive. When we talk to founders about good and bad investors, one of the ways we describe the good ones is to say "he writes checks." That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Far from it. It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. You may be thinking, how hard could that be? You'll see when you try it. It follows from the nature of angel investing that the decisions are hard. You have to guess early, at the stage when the most promising ideas still seem counterintuitive, because if they were obviously good, VCs would already have funded them."
Stringing people along while not being able to make up their mind is what mediocre investors and VCs do - without seeing good evidence to the contrary, I'd guess that this applies to employers as well.
Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I'm not saying the approach is wrong or doesn't work or anything along those lines, merely that it's not how you hire the best and the brightest. Now, it's possible he meant "the best and the brightest" in the cliched way where everyone thinks they hire the best and the brightest, in which case it's fine. But in a literal sense, if your organization needs the best and the brightest, you won't get it following those suggestions.
Edit2: the point of pg's advice isn't that being decisive somehow is correlated with risk-taking and thus higher returns. The point is that being indecisive doesn't lead to significantly better decisions and if you can't make decisions quickly, you won't get the very best deals. If you're known to be indecisive or advertise this up front, no one who can get other investors will come to you. This is absolutely the case for talent.
Cultural fit is not a good reason either. If you can't judge whether someone fits in during the interview, you're probably not going to figure that out during the trial period during which you have a desperate person desperately trying to fit in. What's worse, this very mindset of "let's hire people who fit in" leads to the worst culture. If culture matters to you, hire people who are different.
And yes, finding good engineers, regardless of cultural fit, is by far the hardest problem. If you're optimizing for cultural fit and you're not Google/Facebook-type talent magnet, you're not even in the competition for the best talent. This may be fine if your bar is low - and let's face it, almost everyone's is - but again we're no longer talking about the best and the brightest.