I'm confused, because the best are working for someone already or for themselves. How can they come in for 2-3 days?
Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#12For those stating this would cause candidates to work for free:
"During this time, all Wonoloers would be considered as independent contractors and get paid for the job performed. Wonolo would take care of payroll as well as other administrative HR burdens involved."
This could also clear the air of expected compensation from the start.
Regardless, I do think the idea behind this approach has merit, but it could also use some realistic iteration itself.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#13> Bring in remaining candidates over the next 2-3 days .. Collect feedback at the end of each day I would love to know how many candidates this is actually viable for. My assumption is it would significantly reduce my selection pool.
I would think a truly serious candidate would be willing to invest some of his PTO for this type of scenario.
I think you mean "desperate" rather than "serious." This idea may work with modest results in a down market, or a market where employees expect to be treated like supplicants to the almighty.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#14What I find disturbing about this is that lean concepts, from Deming to Toyota to software dev and so forth, is meant to benefit both the company and the customer — reduce waste, increase flow, make products and services that people want and that make companies money.
"Lean recruitment" is a bastardization of the term, as it's basically a cool-sounding way for companies to exploit job-seekers in a way that doesn't make things better for the job seeker but certainly advantages the company.
Company gets some free (which may be illegal in some jurisdictions) or paid-but-still-illegal (just saying "independent contractor" isn't a magic word) labor and a low-cost way to vet candidates. Job-seekers get ... an opportunity to work in a diminished capacity in the hopes of getting a job. And no, calling someone an "independent contractor" doesn't necessarily make it so, if the person is doing work in the office, under your direction, with your equipment — companies get in trouble calling people independent contractors when they're actually employees. The description from the original post certainly sounds like it fits this pretty well.
I don't think the current interview process is working as well as it could, and it's ripe for some rebooting. But I don't see that labelling "worker exploitation" as "lean" gets us there.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#15I'm confused, because the best are working for someone already or for themselves. How can they come in for 2-3 days?
In tech almost everyone are employee (for someone or themselves). They can take vacation time, PTO or make some extra hours everyday (moonlighting).
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#16>2. Bring in remaining candidates over the next 2-3 days and have them go through the job that they will be performing if they were to be hired.
>...
>4. Bring in final candidates (select few) based on multiple days of feedback, have them perform the same job again for one day and make the final decision.
So if I'm doing arithmetic correctly, you're asking candidates to participate in a trial run for a total of 3 to 4 full working days so you can evaluate them.
I wonder if the writer of the article considered that it will skew the candidate pool towards recent college grads trying to land their first job, and/or unemployed people who can't quickly find a replacement job (because they are undesirable.)
The ones who won't apply are the valuable stars already employed. It's very likely they only have 10 PTO days. The writer needs a reality check if he thinks desirable candidates would be willing to burn up 4 vacation days for a trial work period.
No job recruiting strategy is perfect and most have unintentional side effects (e.g. distorting the candidate pool) that are not explicitly discussed by articles extolling whatever method they're proposing.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#17Unless I'm currently unemployed, if someone asked me to do this I would politely say, "thank you, but no thank you." It has been my experience that there are oodles of development and operations jobs out there and not enough candidates to fill the positions. As a prospective employee, if I have multiple companies interested in hiring me, I'm not going to take days off of work in the off-chance that I might get an offer from you. And giving that time up for free is a non-starter. At least pay me a market-rate contracting fee.
I keep hearing this advice repeated. Maybe I live in Crazytown, but I doubt it's realistic at any scale and likely self-selects for young, inexperienced, or presently unemployed candidates.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#18For those stating this would cause candidates to work for free: "During this time, all Wonoloers would be considered as independent contractors and get paid for the job performed. Wonolo would take care of payroll as well as other administrative HR burdens involved." This could also clear the air of expected compensation from the start. Regardless, I do think the idea behind this approach has merit, but it could also…
Calling people "independent contractors" doesn't necessarily make it true. Depending on jurisdiction, they have to meet certain criteria to be called that; otherwise they're an employee, and the company can be subject to penalties from the IRS and Department of Labor (in the US).
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#19I'm currently involved in the recruitment process for our team -- this mostly means administering programming tests, and very occasionally an interview.
My feedback on this "get them to work in your team for several days doing real work" is that this would cause a massive productivity drop for our project, and we would almost certainly miss deadlines. It's possible, sure, but the time just to find a brand new person something that's possible to do, introduce them to the code-base, review their code afterwards and still manage the rest of the team would be a serious drain.
I also question the value of evaluating different people doing different bits of work, which this seems to imply. Surely a programming test is better because then you're measuring against the same thing with each different person? It's not "real work", but I don't believe you can accurately measure someone's "real productivity" from a 1-2 day crash course anyway.
It's always good to try out new things, and I'm happy it worked for the company who did the interview, but for us I don't think we could afford to hire this way.
Re: Lean Recruitment – Hire faster and better
#20I suppose it depends heavily on your field, but I can't see this working well for a job that has a lengthy ramp-up time (where it might take months of training to start doing anything useful).
This is focused on tech jobs. What is for you, a "job that has a lengthy ramp-up time"?
To clarify, I'm speaking as an inexperienced electrical engineer. I feel like anything I could do the day of hire with no time spent familiarizing myself with the product could just as easily be demonstrated in an interview with less time wasted.