Me and the other directors at my new company have been toying with a new idea, paying people for the work they do on interviews (well sorta).
Basically the idea we are toying with is when we give a programming test as part of the interview we basically offer them the choice of either doing a toy project that has no value to us as a company, or giving them the option to fix any outstanding tickets on one of our open-source projects with a bounty attached to it. This way if your programming test gets accepted you stand a good chance of getting the job AND get paid the bounty.
Programming tests never sat right with me because it seems like a huge time investment to ask of someone who might not get a job. So I wanted to make the process more fair and beneficial to applicants.
Would love to hear what #fedihire thinks about this.
@freemo That's not bad. Personally, I prefer trial periods. Like someone enough in an interview? Agree to hire and pay them for one week as a contractor. If all goes well, then you hire them on as a full employee after.
@freemo Right, but when you do it explicitly, (a) it's like an extended interview, and (b) during this period you can avoid the W2s and some of the onboarding overhead, in case you choose not to hire them.