Should a company do trial employment?

Trek Glowacki — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 18:06:46 +0000

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.

Delegating when only you can do the work

Sean Massa — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 17:33:33 +0000

by Trek and Sean

Leaders often end up in the situation where they accumulated more responsibilities then they can execute alone. Delegation is the answer, but you can't just had someone a new task and expect them to succeed.

How do you delegate when only you can do the work?

There are three steps to this no longer being your problem.

Drive Collaboration: The first step of delegation is collaboration. Identify a team member who you want to be able to do this task. Ask them to help you complete the task. The goal here is to get them comfortable understanding what you are doing and how you do it.

Navigate Collaboration: After the team member has a handle on the task, have them do the task while you assist. You are still there to make sure it's done properly, but make sure they are the one actually doing the work.

Delegate Execution: After the team member can handle the task without your help, delegate it!

You are still (probably) responsible for this task being completed, but not for executing it.

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DEV Community: Latticeworks

Should a company do trial employment?

Delegating when only you can do the work