Are you looking for work, either as a consultant or a candidate? As part of their filtering process, potential clients/hiring managers want to see how you work. That's fine. But too often, the work they want will take you hours or days. While managers think they will get useful results, too often, they don't. And because the hiring manager is only thinking of their time, they don't consider offering you any compensation for your time.
Two big problems: The hiring manager does not receive useful results that can predict your success. And candidates and consultants invest time that has no perceived payoff for them.
That's a big waste of time and money.
I agree—hiring managers do need to assess a candidate's or consultant's skills. (I write and speak to show my skills, and I have a considerable body of public work to show for it. Very few other people have that.)
So what can a candidate or consultant do to show their skills without working for free?
There are two sides to this question, the hiring manager and the candidate. Let's start with the hiring manager and why they make these requests.
What the Hiring Manager Needs to Know
Hiring managers are almost always overloaded, trying to fit their hiring work in with all their other responsibilities. (See Three Tips to Streamline Your Hiring, Part 1, and the rest of the series to see how I worked with a hiring manager years ago.) That's why managers want to know the answers to these two questions:
- Can the candidate do the job? Do they have sufficient technical skills?
- Will the candidate fit in enough with the team and the rest of the organization?
That first question leads to many tests and auditions, sometimes, even before the phone screen. (See Can Auditions Be Too Much of a Good Thing?)
The more work you ask a candidate to do—at any point in the interview—the more you're asking for free work or consulting.
Instead of a lot of solo work, or many auditions, ask yourself this question:
What's the fastest way to see a signal that this candidate will work well in this organization?
Here are some options I've seen for faster discovery for a candidate's relevance to your organization:
- Create a phone screen with elimination questions. Then ask several senior staff to use those phone screens in parallel on all the candidates who pass the first resume review. (I wrote about this in Hiring Geeks That Fit.)
- Ask an HR person to assess the candidate with the dirt-bag questions.
When you ask the elimination or dirt-bag questions, you can see how well the candidate fits in the organization.
Yes, ask the cultural fit questions before you ask the technical skills questions. That's because people who fit with the organization can learn fast. (Especially if you want to use agile approaches. See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter.)
Based on a little investment from you and the candidate, you have enough information on a candidate's skills to know whether or not to proceed. You don't need a lot of auditions or tests, and you're definitely not wasting a candidate's time.
The candidate has a mirror image perspective.
What Candidates Need to Know
Candidates look for opportunities. They want to know if the work is something they want to do, and if the company culture is a good fit for them.
In my experience, most candidates want to know the answers to those two questions much sooner, rather than later. And they don't want to waste a lot of their time answering questions or building your product. The candidate's question is:
How fast can I see if this job is for me?
Instead of lots of tests or supposed auditions, you can use the phone screen to learn what the company values. Because why else would they ask you these questions?
But what if the company still asks you to invest your time?
You can ask for compensation and the company can offer it.
Compensate People for Their Time
Regardless of your potential role, read Consulting Tip 4: Always Focus on Your Value for Your Client’s Time and When is an Interview Free Consulting?
Just as these long tests or auditions make the hiring manager feel better, they don't offer any real value to the company or the candidate. The company wastes the candidate's time. The candidate feels as if they have to go through the motions if they want that specific job.
But worse, most hiring managers realize that the more obstacles they place in front of a candidate, the more likely the candidate will decline to spend this time and will look for a different job. In effect, the hiring manager punishes the best candidates by pretending those candidates are just like all the others.
Hiring managers: offer to pay people to come in and work with your team for a day. Yes, pay for a day. Don't change how the team works—ask them to work the same way the team works now.
Candidates or consultants: You can suggest this to the hiring manager, too.
The Bottom Line
Don't ask people to invest in your organization before you commit to invest in them. Create a congruent experience for everyone involved.
Remember: you don't need to thoroughly understand anyone's technical capabilities before you know if they can fit with the organization. Learning technical skills with a team is relatively easy, if people can know how to get along. That's much more important than any one person's skills.
More Reading and Resources
See these books:
I stopped writing under the HTP category on my site, but the archive is still there, and is evergreen.
Mark Kilby and I developed a self-study Remote Interviewing workshop you might like.