What 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.<p>"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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>>...<p>>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.<p>So if I'm doing arithmetic correctly, you're asking candidates to participate in a trial run for <i>a total of 3 to 4 full working days</i> so you can evaluate them.<p>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.)<p>The ones who <i>won't</i> 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.<p>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.
Unless 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.<p>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.
This is a terrible idea. I barely can schedule time when I'm job hunting (while still employed) to do the marathon 5-8 hour interview blocks that many companies demand. There's only so many PTO hours I can burn, and I'm certainly skeptical of working several (!) possibly unpaid days just for the <i>chance</i> of being offered a position. The hell with that.
So the comments are focusing on the candidate, but how exactly does this reduce the "expensive" up front cost of resume review, phone screens, and on-site interviews cited? The described process still performs reviews and screens, but instead of 1-4 or so man hours per employee of engineering time "wasted" during interviewing, you are instead slowing the entire team down for multiple days to effectively onboard temporary employees.<p>Sorry, this makes next to no sense from the candidate's viewpoint or the company's.
I'm currently involved in the recruitment process for our team -- this mostly means administering programming tests, and very occasionally an interview.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
For those stating this would cause candidates to work for free:<p>"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."<p>This could also clear the air of expected compensation from the start.<p>Regardless, I do think the idea behind this approach has merit, but it could also use some realistic iteration itself.
This article seems to give tips to companies, but some of the suggestions are pretty disrespectful towards the candidates themselves. I am likely not going to be interested in a company that asks for more than a phone screen and in-person interview - they're time consuming, and assumes that the candidate has the time to burn at their current job. I have plenty of companies to choose from that are likely to be more respectful to me.
To be honest, this is arrogance on the employers part to the absolute extreme. Interviews are two-way streets.<p>When I interview, I am as much interviewing the company, if not more than they are interviewing me.<p>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.<p>This isn't a workable practise in either direction.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And that's fine, as long as we don't pretend it's something it isn't.
I am currently in the process of hiring myself and I don't think there is any way senior engineers will go for such a prolonged process.<p>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.
I 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).
How is this process supposed to work for candidates who are currently employed, and for whom even scheduling the time to sneak away for interviews is a real challenge? If I'm going through this process, what am I supposed to tell my boss? "Hey, remember how I got sick the other morning? Well, I'm going to be sick again all day Thursday, and if that goes well, all day Friday."
Pros and cons to the team doing the hiring aside, this 2-3 day thing is almost definitely a deal-breaker to anyone who currently has an actual job (you know, the passive job seekers everyone says they're desperate to hire).<p>But for the perennially unemployed, sure, why not? What have they got to lose?
"who will fit well within the organization"<p>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.<p>"who will be loyal through ups and downs"<p>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")<p>"who will perform the best at the job."<p>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.<p>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.
> Bring in remaining candidates over the next 2-3 days .. Collect feedback at the end of each day<p>I would love to know how many candidates this is actually viable for. My assumption is it would significantly reduce my selection pool.