Seconding this. Read the candidate's actual resume, spend 30 minutes trying to suss out any deception on it, then a couple of hours trying to gauge compatibility, and also sell the candidate on working for you.

You don't even really need a probationary period in an "at will" state.

At some point, you either trust the credentials from universities and certification bodies, and take what the resume says at face value, or you have to try to reinvent some wheels, and re-discover that eliminating the phonies and mimics is a very difficult problem that even the experts can't solve entirely.

I don't know what the conversion factor is between running a fruitless job search filled with cargo-culted bozo tasks, and just randomly picking the first vaguely suitable candidate off the stack and letting them run for a few months, but I suspect that filling the position quickly and painlessly is probably worth about one month of having a 0%ile employee, or six months of a 20%ile, or keeping a 40%ile employee until they retire. This rests on the presumption that some work done right now is worth more than the same amount done some time in the future, and that higher %ile-ranked candidates will be less tolerant of any stupid hiring games.

Hmm, interesting. I don't know if it's legal for me to run different interview tracks for immigrant and domestic workers. If I'm hiring away an H-1B from somewhere else, probationary isn't going to work. They will not join since their residency depends on employment. But it appears that some domestic engineers prefer the shorter test series with a bigger opportunity to prove themselves.

Does anyone know if having different tracks is legal?