Gee, is it kind of like sex and boyfriends? At least back in my olden days.
If you offer the boyfriend sex as a "free sample" then he wouldn't consider marrying you ("hiring you")? Yes, I think it's exactly like that.
There's a ministerial analog, now effectively dead in the UUA, called serial candidating.
A church would have a string of candidates try for a pulpit, providing a season or more of sermons at no cost to the congregation.
The side effect is that the church got spoiled for choice and convenience, not unlike the sex metaphor mentioned before. It similarly encultured a poor attitude to commitment and loyalty.
It took a strong ministerial college and the good offices of UUA staffers (if I understand correctly) to kill this practice (and good riddance).
Good for you for seeing through it with freelance candidates.
How awful it must have been for the ministers who were "auditioning" but had little chance of being hired! Certainly a sermon takes a lot longer to prepare than any of the free samples I've written.
This raises some really interesting issues about hiring in terms of how exactly we can assess skills adequately.
Hm! Interesting. I've never heard of that, but it sounds like a case of the arrogancies. I'm glad you looked at the actual results and have realized it's not worth your time.
Well--I have met several contractors who have a similar, albeit slightly different, situation. Many contractors can provide a good estimate (within 20% of total cost) for a project in about 2-3 hours.
However, most clients want a more complete proposal with less variance. These complete proposals take a lot of time and effort to produce. And, often times, after producing these proposals, they do not get the business unless they are the lowest priced contractor.
One company I know decided this was a major income drain for their firm. So they changed the policy--quick quotes were free. Detailed quotes cost money for time and energy. Ever since this change they have a much higher conversion rate on detailed proposals and did not lose potential clients--they now make more money then ever before!
We have the issue in software--can't I try the software for a month with out paying for it? If I like it, I will buy it, but I want to make sure it works before we spend that kind of money--know what. Every client we did this with, returned the product. 99% of the clients we refused to do this for, kept the product.
There is a definate correlation between spending money and taking something serious. If you produce work for free, people don't take your work seriously. So, instead of refusing to do a "sample," you can say that you charge a "sample fee" for this work, and charge them 90% of your regular fees or something. If they say yes, they are serious and you probably have a new client. If they say no, you just saved yourself a lot of work and effort for someone who wasn't going to hire you anyway.
That's fascinating about trying the software for free. And the sample fee is a good idea. I'm betting the potential client will refuse to pay, in which case, I've saved myself time and money.
Re your comment about hiring and how to assess skills accurately... who knows. I would like to.
I've been at the same employer for over a decade, and have participated in the interview process many times. I compared it to moving in with somebody after one date - it's not a lifetime commitment, but it's still a big leap to make based on not very much information and interaction.
Anne P: I used to do all the hiring interviews at my old company and found it to be one of the most difficult things to do. You spend 1/2 to 1 hour with a person and then you need to decide if they will fit into your work environment, handle the responsibilities that they need to, and be a productive and positive contributor to the team...tough to do.
The best advice is to spend a lot of time preparing for the interview. The first step is to decide what critical skills you need to know about--then design questions, no matter how insane they seem, and see how the react.
In that job the environment, people had to deal with a CEO who could not express thought clearly, rode the fence on most issues, took credit when things went well and passed blame back when things went poorly. The people who succeeded in this environment were confident, self starters, with a lot of critical thinking skills to interpret and produce work for an overbearing CEO.
The best question I came up with to determine if people had the right skill set to work in this environment, was a combination of question and action (even though it made me look like an a**hole):
I would ask the person how far the drive to work was--they would say 10-30 minutes. Then I would ask them how many gas stations they believed were in between work and home. To re-create the extreme pressurs / stress I knew they would have to deal with, I told them to take 5 minutes and walked out of the room.
I never cared about what the answer was--I just wanted to see how they dealt with the stress, being left alone to solve a problem, and how they worked through a problem with so many possible varibles.
I learned this strategy from a book about Bill Gates, and while it is hard to conduct interviews this way, it definately let me get a really good sense of the person's skill set...one person I loved in the interview process and was 95% convinced I would hire, could not answer this question in any logical way...I knew that they would not be a fit. It helped me to make really good hires for the company (everyone I hired was still at the company 2 years after I left--of the 3 people others hired, two had left within one year of my leaving.
So create a list of skills people need, ask questions no matter how weird to test those skills. Also, try to determine what outside factors will affect work--micro-management, stress, etc. and see if you can recreate them. For example, if people constantly interrupt others at your office, have 2-3 co-workers interrupt the interview to see how the candidate handles it. While it may not make the company look awesome, it does give you a sense of how they will handle your specific work environment.
Hope this helps.
Just so you know, I've always thought that hubby's favorite question was a real asshole type of question. ;^)
But, I love him anyway.
So if I know the answer immediately off the top of my head and don't need 5 minutes to think about it (zero the way I normally drive, one if I go the other way because I need to get gas), do I get the job, or not?
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