Hiring and testing
A lot of the energy invested in hiring technical people seems to go in the up-front stages: the want ads, the interviews, the auditions, etc. One of my favorite resources on the topic is Johanna's Hiring Technical People blog, and so far Johanna has chosen to discuss mostly these stages.My experience seems to confirm this bias: getting hired is a long and time-consuming process, which - in spite of France's mandatory "trial period" of three months for most white-collar workers - ends the minute you have set foot in the workplace.
Only once was I terminated during a trial period, very early in my career - the first employee job I ever held, actually. Of all the "new hires" I've ever worked with, none were ever terminated during a trial period. Strangely enough, many of them were not competent for their position in my opinion, and in some cases I was asked for that opinion by upper management - but they were kept on nonetheless.
This makes a weird sort of sense - after having gone to all this trouble to select a "suitable" candidate, it's a tough decision to show them the door after one or two weeks on the job. "Lack of qualified candidates" is a reason I've often heard for not letting go people who had been found wanting during a trial period.
I'm tempted to see a parallel here - hiring is a process in which much energy is invested in the early "design" stages, to try and make sure no mistakes are made, because mistakes are costly to correct later (and perceived as all the more costly for having invested so much energy). The "testing" stage is deferred as long as possible, most often until it's too late.
I wonder what would happen if we drastically reduced the effort spent on the up-front design stages, and hired candidates on the basis of whether their prospective coworkers like them, and whether they think they're qualified to solve our problems. Then very early in the trial period, we'd expect them to start contributing, even if on rather small tasks.
This could even be a win-win proposition - people would be earning money during the hiring process, employers would (hopefully) be getting some work done or getting some useful feedback for that money.
Just a thought...
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