"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.
PS: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, use tryouts to test candidates, you can se more at http://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-audi...
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>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.
I did this myself before starting my current gig and was glad I did--I started the job confident that I liked the work, and the people. And by paying market rates you essentially get a small signing bonus. Consulting rates should be higher than the equivalent salaried hourly.
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.
Sorry, this makes next to no sense from the candidate's viewpoint or the company's.
I think the word they're looking for here is "internship". That's a longer duration and more expensive, but probably(?) less distrustful to the regular team.
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.
"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.
That is to say, it's a farce. The consultancy pays the employee/contractor, but the contractor is acting, by any reasonable interpretation of the relevant laws and regulations, as an employee of the consultancy's client. The involvement of the third-party is superficial and, in my opinion, borderline fraudulent. There is such an imbalance of power in the US that very few employees would actually dare to challenge it, and as a result the downside for challenging it (implicit blacklisting) carries far more weight than the upside (marginal compensation for the disparity in treatment).
My state provides some 'tips' for small businesses. One is employee types, and this sort of a relationship is not an independent contractor. They make a point to say that simply calling someone an independent contractor has no baring on their status, exactly as you have said.
Thanks for the reminder.
When I interview, I am as much interviewing the company, if not more than they are interviewing me.
With the shoe on the other foot, how about candidates vet employers for suitable work environments, measuring them on things such as provision of ergonomic workspaces, quality of perks promised, finesse and speed of HR practices (do they pay on time, is just the tip of the iceberg there), acumen of core founders (it sucks when you start a job and realize the founders are actually utterly incompetent), etc.
This isn't a workable practise in either direction.
Also, if you cannot ascertain if the candidate is able to perform the job function through a simple conversation then either A) the employee representing the company isn't qualified to make the assessment, or B) the role specification isn't clear to the company.
I'll accept that mis-hires happen, again, in both directions, but this is age-old and won't be solved by this one-sided approach.
We're talking about human beings, who need to work for food. When we cut away all the stuff about 'roles' and 'careers' and 'value', what we're really talking about is a human paying another human to do a job.
And that's fine, as long as we don't pretend it's something it isn't.
What we do instead: filter through resumes, pick ones that we like for a 15-30 minute phone screen followed by a 1 hour conversation with the entire team if we decide to move forward.
But for the perennially unemployed, sure, why not? What have they got to lose?
Don't want any minorities to slip thru our carefully crafted filter, only "bros". Because a fraternity ^H^H^H company exclusively staffed by bros is awesome.
"who will be loyal through ups and downs"
Being gullible isn't necessarily a sign of productivity or quality. But for a very weak manager, better someone gullible than not. Of course a weak manager is going to fail anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. So yeah... go ahead and select for a trait only losers select on, what could possibly go wrong? (and see above WRT only hiring "frat bros")
"who will perform the best at the job."
LOL a one day interview is going in the wrong direction, so we'll go further in the wrong direction by making our interviews three days.
I know, I know, we're digging ourselves deeper into a hole, so lets just shovel a hole three times deeper and see if that sole change makes things better.
I would love to know how many candidates this is actually viable for. My assumption is it would significantly reduce my selection pool.
