This is pretty messed up. You make the potential employee do a one week trial run and then you make an offer?<p>Maybe I'm missing something but if you quit your job to do a one week trial run you've lost a great deal of your negotiating power.<p>Its also been pointed out many times that many employment agreements would forbid this work with another company while employed meaning that you'd have to quit to do the trial period.<p>Please, please,<p>1) never do a one week trial run unless you are really desperate for a job. I won't tell someone never to do something as individual situations are always different.<p>2) if you do a trial run, make sure the employment agreement is finalized before you do it. If you negotiate salary and benefits after you quite your previous job then you've got a much better chance of losing this negotiation.<p>A question to pose to companies that do this.<p>I've said a few times now that this type of policy means that you won't be hiring the top 10-20% of developers as I don't believe that they'd put up with this type of behaviour.<p>Do you disagree?? or do you agree and realize that your company doesn't need the very best developers but you want to make sure you are dead right on the developers that you do hire?<p>I've phrased the above to sound as neutral as I could, I'm trying to get some honest feedback not start a flame war:)<p>> As such, we make sure to let them know where we stand in terms of funding, cash, revenue, and other important metrics.<p>This on the other hand impresses me a great deal. To me transparency is the sign of good management.
Hi all - sorry it was unclear. Our trial runs are not necessarily one week. In most cases candidates have full time jobs and can't commit that much time. It's usually 2 days (over weekend) or late afternoon for a couple hours.<p>Post has been updated to reflect this. Most our candidates actually appreciate the personal experience and we don't just bring anybody into a trial run unless we're already mostly sure we're ready to make an offer. I think that everyone who has gone through the process thus far can speak positively on it. It isn't just a one sided street, candidates can get a sense for whether THEY will like the job, team, and culture at the company as well.<p>Other people have done similar things (longer timeframes even) with good success. See David w/Weebly: <a href="http://www.sequoiacap.com/grove/posts/akzj/trial-week-our-hiring-secret" rel="nofollow">http://www.sequoiacap.com/grove/posts/akzj/trial-week-our-hi...</a>
A one-week trial run seems like a very bad idea to me. I wouldn't even consider going through such a long interview process. It's basically a low-pass filter on your candidate pool - maybe that's the goal?
> As such, we make sure to let them know where we stand in terms of funding, cash, revenue, and other important metrics.<p>As someone who has interviewed with a number of companies in recent days I really appreciate this. One company I interviewed with went as far as to tell me how much runway they have in an initial phone screen. That's taking things pretty far, but for an early stage (ie pre-series A) company everyone knows your runway is measured in months anyway (unless you have significant revenue) so it's nice to know how soon the company is going to be getting into fundraising.
Considering the company is run by first time founders with virtually no hiring experience, I don't understand why they were compelled to write a post on how to hire.
Harry, do you pay the prospective employees during the trial run? The blog post implies that it's a week long, ("We’ve been able to spot problems during the week..."). While the information gained by both parties during a week of working together is no doubt very valuable for them both, a week is a long time to work for no pay.<p>EDIT: Oh, I see your edit, these trials runs typically aren't a full week long. But in any case, if someone is going to give up a substantial amount of time, I hope you pay them for it.
> The first 2 employees we hired were people that we have previously lived/worked with<p><i>lived</i> with<p>at this moment, this early, I can predict I'm reading "wise" career/entrepreneurial advice by a 20-something, at best, most likely<p>I stop reading