alt Hacker NewsThe "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire?
Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment.
You haven't replaced anything, you've just added another level of hassle for everyone.
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> You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire?
Sample size of 100 seems like overkill for finding a 6-month contract employee.
How about starting with a sample size of 1:
Sort the applicants (ether randomly or by criteria of your choice, pre-filtering as desired) and hire the first one who meets the minimum qualifications, based on a streamlined interview process of your choice.
You could experiment with a larger sample size if desired (perhaps large enough that you expect to find at least one qualified candidate.)
It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.
In a different life, I went through multiple interview stages at a FAANG company. In between the sessions, we got to talk to some of the (future) managers. One of them told me that this whole interview process is broken, we should all just be hired temporarily and see how that goes (akin to what Yegge is proposing). The batch had maybe 30 people. Probably not easy to place all of them, but certainly doable.
It seems the benefit would be one sided - that initial 100 -> 10 (ATS/interview/coin-flip) filtering processes would as usual have a large percentage of both false positive and false negatives.
The false negatives suck for both candidate and hiring company who have accidentally rejected someone they would have like to have hired.
The benefit of the "provisional employment" process would be that even if it doesn't help avoid the false negatives, it would weed out the false positives so that the company at least ends up hiring people who are qualified and a good fit (even though due to the false negatives they may have rejected even better candidates).
I think you've just lowered the risk of a bad hire for the company, which might allow them to "take a chance" on candidates they might otherwise pass on.
You could be less selective with a high-turnover pool of temporary workers, something like an internship program. But that doesn’t mean anyone gets to be an intern.
To be honest, a lot of ideas are like that - coming from folks who want to be employed but haven't actually ran an employment process.
I’ve run a program like this. My answers to your objections are:
You don’t run it for everyone, just people who seem good enough and are willing to do it. A resume filter and a 30-minute conversation are usually enough.
You stop as soon as you’ve got your hire. If you’re bad at picking people for the screen, you learn the signals quickly because of your level of investment.
It does replace a longer traditional interview loop. You hardly talk to them up front. You tell the candidate you will extend an offer right after the work phase.
Another objection is not everyone can afford to spend that time with you. That’s true. We would pay them, and still got some refusals. You have to accept that every interview style works better for some candidates than others. You’ll also find candidates who love it.