There are many benefits to trial employment – hiring someone for less than a month to decide if you want to hire them full time.
You get to see the candidate work in a real-world scenario. You get to spend a real amount of time with them. You get to verify claims made in the interview. You have a clear check-in point where you can back out.
However, trial employment can exclude certain groups of candidates from your hiring pool. Assuming you want a diverse hiring pool, this could be problematic.
For example, candidates who are:
- parents: won't relocate for only a potential job, disrupting their family life.
- new to your tech/tools: will spend time learning instead of performing, making the trial period not representative of their work.
- managing chronic health issues: need continuous health coverage, which would be broken by one or more trial periods
- without savings: need income stability.
In a country with strong social safety nets and worker protections, trial employment could be a really great way to form a longer-term working relationship. This is sadly not the case in many countries.
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