Working Interviews

“I have job candidates do a working interview of 1-2 days before I decide if I’ll hire them. I write them a check for the time but don’t put them on payroll. Is this okay since I’m paying them?”

My HR Survival Tip

Most “working interviews” involve having the candidate actually doing the work they would normally do if hired. When you do that, you have created an employee who should be on your payroll.

Paying this person by company check or cash doesn’t make it legal; it just shows you actually know you shouldn’t have them doing a working interview without compensation. The only difference is you aren’t paying state and federal payroll taxes… and that’s not a good thing. Plus, if the candidate were injured during a working interview, you’d have to pay all medical bills yourself since you aren’t calling the candidate an employee.

The solution is to develop some type of testing you can do with each candidate you interview to give you a good idea of their skill or knowledge. Testing should be completed within 2 hours at most. Here are a few examples:

• 

  Administrative – provide the candidate with a printed letter that has some special formatting challenges, like a table, bold words, tabs, etc. Put him/her in front of a computer and ask them to duplicate, print, and save the letter. Time it so you know how long it took. Look at the digital file, did they use the space bar instead of the software’s features?

• Sales – provide the candidate with an item to sell you and see how they do.
• Data entry – provide the candidate with a stack of forms that need to be input and watch their time and accuracy.
• Accounting – have a dummy company set up already and have the candidate enter a few invoices, pay a few bills, and set up a couple of accounts.
• IT – this might be a questionnaire with issues the candidate needs to resolve or, for lower levels, the candidate might be put in front of a computer and asked to get it up and running (not knowing you left a cable unplugged).
• Physical ability – if you’ve been clear the job requires the ability to lift or move around, present them with that physical test. Can they lift this object off the floor to table height and back down to the floor?

You must be consistent and provide the same test to everyone interviewed or you could be seen as discriminatory. Every job has something you can test; you just need to be creative in figuring out what would give you the most information. What might you be tested on for your own job skills?