Are trial work weeks a good idea?

If a company offered you a paid one-week trial instead of using a traditional interview process, would you do it?

NOBODY REALLY TRUSTS anybody or anything anymore, at least not in the hiring process, replete as it is with AI slop résumés, live AI interview tools and plain old lying; if nothing else, the AI era is giving people a lot of cover.

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So, it is probably unsurprising in the grand scheme that companies, especially those in tech and white-collar sectors, are turning to ever more intensive trial shifts, in what one writer calls the “show your work era of job hunting.”

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“AI lets everyone talk,” wrote Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover. “Your next boss wants to be sure you can walk.”

She likens it to the way college professors have increasingly asked students to show more of their work and do more exams in person. “Hiring managers are looking for workers who can back up what they say they know. The job interview has always been a sort of audition; now companies are increasingly looking for people who can get on the proverbial stage and perform.”

Not that the idea is all that new, mind you — some workplaces have been believers in the trial shift model for a while, although today’s companies are taking it further, with trial shifts that stretch as long as a whole week.

“People are often surprised when they hear about a trial week, but to us it makes a lot of sense,” wrote David Rusenko Jr., founder of Weebly. “It’s hard to tell from a few hours of conversation what someone is really like, or how good she is at her job. And it’s hard for a candidate to tell what it’s really like to work with us.”

Rusenko added that very few applicants opt out of the trial week, and that around two thirds of the time, the applicant ends up getting hired.”

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The trial work week has some pitfalls, naturally. Companies that try to view it as a very short, unpaid internship or a cheap way to get some extra help might find it less well received, although one employer who uses the trial week, Moe Hutt, told Business Insider that “companies are able to do this right now because it is an employer’s market.” When that inevitably changes, getting candidates to sit for a week-long tryout will probably be a bit harder.

But Rusenko suggests it works better when you throw money at it. “We want to make it worth their time,” he said. “We fly them out, put them up in a hotel and pay them for the week. I tell people that the worst-case scenario is that they use a week of vacation, but because of the extra pay they can take a nicer vacation later on.” Kieran Delamont