Trial-workdays

Day 350 / 365

I have been on both sides of the hiring process in the software industry. Anyone who has had any experience with it will agree with my conclusion that the interview process for developers is broken. Many of the common coding questions asked are those that have nothing to do with the actual work, which leads to many good candidates not getting hired. And many people can be experts in clearing these interviews but will fail to perform well when it comes to real work.

But still, we follow this process, because that’s how it has always been. And people hate change. Start-up culture, however, is a bit more open to experimentation. One of the new hiring processes that I came across in startups is trial workdays.

Take Basecamp for example. After they have shortlisted a candidate based on a telephonic interview, they invite them to work with their team for a week on a short project. Not only that, the candidate would get paid for the week’s work, regardless of whether he gets selected or not.

I think this is an awesome solution. This is the best way to find out whether a candidate would be a good fit or not. You can even get reviews from the team about how they found working with the new candidate to be.

More and more companies are moving away from some conventional beliefs, such as hiring people based on their degrees. I am a Mechanical engineer, yet I have been working as a software developer for 3 years now. It’s time for them to rethink this aspect of the hiring process as well.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — A simple criterion for making choices