Any hiring process will by definition favour certain kinds of candidates at the expense of others. Having a week long paid trial is a great way for the company to be less conservative about who they try out, but will also mean they’ll miss out on candidates who are already employed and unwilling to take time off or quit their job to participate in it. In the end though, if they can tap into an undervalued candidate pool though, they should come put ahead.
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Almost everyone takes more than a week to ramp up to a large codebase. There isn't much differentiation after the first week. It's more like, we know if someone was a quality hire after the first or second quarter (3-6 months) of their employment.
In this case, the week long paid trial is work from home, and I did not notice anything that said that the work had to be done during normal businesses hours. It should be possible for most people to fit that in around their current employment.
> I did not notice anything that said that the work had to be done during normal businesses hours
It doesn't seem an unreasonable assumption.
Having them work outside of business hours (isolated, no real time communication) on an standalone project (because self-onboard on a large and complicated project isn't reasonable) wouldn't really be a representative test of if they can work in a team and on a real project. At that point you are really just paying to solve a larger coding test.
> It should be possible for most people to fit that in around their current employment.
I highly doubt that most people would be able to fit ~40 hours of work on top of their normal work schedule. I'm single and have no particular obbligations, and I would still struggle. No way a parent of a young child or someone who has a dependant parent/relative would be able to fix that much amount of work in their schedule.
And even if someone manages to do 2 full time jobs for a week, would their output really be representative of their skills? I certainly wouldn't want to be judged on the quality/quantity of my output when working late nights after 8 hours in the office.
Many employment contracts prohibit working a week for another software company, possibly a competitor, without approval from the employer.
I can start working for you - even if it's just for a week - only after I've quit my current job. So working that week before a hiring decision is simply not an option, even ignoring all the issues of time availability.
Anyone capable of working 5 days 16h productively is unlikely willing to give away 5 week worth free time.
it sure is a good thing that most people don't have children or stuff they need to do after 8-10 hours workdays otherwise this wouldn't work for most people.
So now I have to work 16h a day for a week? That won’t affect my performance at all.
That seems unclear to me too. Can the 1 week trial period begin after you gave your employer your 2 weeks.
> The “first rule” of wing-walking, according to observers, went something like this: “Don’t let go of what you’ve got until you get hold of something better.”