- Employers are moving into "work trials" to see whether candidates can actually do the job.
- That shift sometimes forces workers who are already employed to take time off.
- One startup, Crosby, says it's bringing candidates in on Sundays to accommodate them.
When Ryan Daniels began asking job candidates to come in on Sundays, he expected some eye rolls.
Daniels is the founder of Crosby, a startup-law-firm-hybrid that provides basic legal services to other startups. Instead, he said, many candidates responded with relief. A Sunday interview meant they did not have to burn a vacation day on a hiring process that increasingly asks candidates to prove themselves on the job before they are hired.
Employers are pushing deeper into "work trials," asking candidates to complete projects or audition in the office, as artificial intelligence makes it easier to inflate a résumé and harder to know who can actually do the job.
For some applicants, that means taking time off from their existing jobs just to stay in the running. Crosby's answer: Bring them in on Sunday.
"We've been pretty dogmatic about hiring the best people and questioning everything," Daniels said. That included rethinking when interviews had to happen. When the company started offering Sundays as an option, he said, "a lot of people were just like, 'That would be a huge relief.'"
At Crosby, a software engineer might be dropped into a live project — not just to show they can code, but to show how they use coding assistants on the job.
For business roles, candidates are asked to come in on Sundays for panel interviews with Crosby's executive team. The setup works for Crosby, too. Executives are often working on Sundays anyway, Daniels said, but their calendars are less clogged with meetings, so they have more time to participate.
Crosby isn't the only company stretching the workweek. Foxglove, a startup that builds data and monitoring software for robotics, uses paid work trials to put candidates through their paces. Ellis Neder, now the company's head of design, told Business Insider he took days off and flew to Foxglove's San Francisco office for a trial over a long weekend.
Harvey, a leader in the legal tech space, last valued at $11 billion, has also found an unorthodox way to interview. The startup often has candidates go back and forth on a problem set in Google Docs.
Harvey's CEO Winston Weinberg told the "Access" podcast that he has interviewed candidates who are good at "presenting things," but that they "break down" when writing out responses to direct questions.
At Crosby, the audition does not stop when the formal interview ends. Candidates join the team for lunch or dinner, giving them a chance to see how employees interact and decide whether they want in. Daniels said that kind of window can help close a candidate who has their pick of offers.
"If people vibe with the team, we never lose them," he said. "If they don't, it's a good lesson for all of us."
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