Were the people you were interviewing already unemployed? Work trials are harder when people are already employed. There can be legal issues as well as scheduling ones.

If you’re doing traditional on-site interviews, you’re already asking for multiple days (unless they live nearby).

It can be a challenge sometimes, but not as often as you might think.

I’m sure there are heavy-handed employment contracts that prohibit side work, but hasn’t been a problem in practice.

This will always be the problem with trials. Anyone with a job, often underemployed between software roles these days, will be excluded.

Still, it does benefit the hiring company, just not the applicant in these situations.

> Still, it does benefit the hiring company

Not sure it benefits the hiring company when they are artificially reducing the pool of applicants to only people who don't already have jobs.

Not that there's shame in not having a job, especially in today's market (shit happens, I'm sure lots of very qualified people are currently looking), but there are solid statistical reasons why social proof of already being employed is seen as a positive.

Net benefits perhaps. It absolutely lets the hiring company get more information by increasing the amount of time spent by the candidate before a commitment occurs.

How do you deal with onboarding, both technically, and legally if your eval period is 1-2 days? I mean unless you are a one-man team, and can just give all permissions yourself, and ignore legalities, it sounds way too short

Same as for other contractors.

Yes, there is friction, but if you do it enough, it gets reasonably small.

I assume the paid work is issued via a private repo and not full access?