Call a contract organization and bring in a few people for a 6 month contract. At the end of the contract offer jobs to the good ones.
6 Months is only because that is what contract organizations want - you can buy the good people out sooner, but they need 6 months from people to make their budgets work. 6 months is plenty of time to ensure you know if someone is bad or just slow to get productive, but not too long to pay someone who is not worth it.
I prefer the contract-to-hire model, but I say this as an employee. It's hard to know whether I'll like a place, but if the place is open to 3-6 month contracts, I can find out and can make it work. Unfortunately, this isn't the way things seem to work.
Also, the duration of 6 month is short enough that, even if I don't like the place, the incentive is there to put the best foot forward to get the best recommendation possible to go somewhere else.
I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.
In practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months.
Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.
There's plenty of good advice in this thread, but ultimately you won't know until you work there. After 20 years in the business, what I've done and would advise people to do, is to negotiate a 6 month contract-to-hire arrangement. This way it's all out in the open that you'll be evaluating each other and there's less hard feelings if you walk at the end of the contract.
For anyone with any kind of reasonable background suggesting they can do the job, the alternative is simple: just give them the job on a probationary basis. Give 5 people the job, tell them one will keep it after a 3 month contract period. Choose the ones you want to keep.
You simply need to set expectations according to the truth. If you have 6 months of their salary banked, tell them that. If you're uncertain you can pay them, tell them and hire people who are OK with that.
We will hire anyone who sounds good, and fire them within a month if it turns out they're not up to our standards. Then, we will ensure we never get anyone who isn't already employed and anyone just looking for a paycheck or three.
If you heard that even 20% of people were fired within the first month, how likely would you be to take that job?
Note: It's usually called contract to hire. And it just takes the interview stress and pushes it out to 1-6 months.
We tried that at one company I worked for and it worked well enough. Our contract with the consulting firm said if we dumped the contractor within 90 days we didn't pay a cent for any of their time. This resulted in the consulting firm only sending us candidates that had good reviews in prior engagements. And good reviews from prior engagements strongly correlates with good reviews in future engagements.
Yes exactly. Sometimes they ask you if you can negotiate with your employer to shorten this period, which is often the case.
Of course, they would rather it was shorter, but hiring is already a multi-months long process in most cases, so a few more months is inconvenient, but not the end of the world. If you need someone now, you hire contractors.
Paying someone for a whole year gives you one chance of finding a full-time employee. Paying four different people for 3 months each gives you four chances.
For small tech companies in Denmark (I don't know much about other sectors/countries), it's common to hire people on a contract or fixed-term basis initially, something like 3-12 months. Then each side can decide if they'd like to make the arrangement more permanent in the future. For tiny companies with uncertain revenues it's pretty common to just have that be the default mode of employment: when you get 12 months of funding, you hire people for another 12 months, because you can't honestly promise any more than that anyway.
It costs a lot to hire someone and onboard them. And, if you make a practice of firing people after 60 days because they aren't a good fit for whatever reason, you're probably going to find that you have a hard time hiring anyone.
As I said in another comment, (paid) interning and hiring someone as a contractor/consultant for a fixed period are great for situations where it works for everyone. But, if I'm looking for a new full-time position, I'm almost certainly going to pass on a position that doesn't carry with it the presumption of ongoing employment.
[ADDED: And, yes, some companies have an official probationary period but AFAIK that's mostly reserved for when a hire really isn't working out for some reason.]
This can work if there is a large enough pool of quality applicants that are either currently unemployed or are already contractors. If they are contractors, they may not be seeking full time employment (they like the mobility of contracting). But if you want to recruit someone who has a full time job, lots of luck convincing them to leave a good position (or any steady position) for a 6-month contract that "may" turn into a full time job.
This is how I was hired at my current job though. I was laid off for a few months, and a contract to hire position opened up. I took it, because it was better than not working -- but I would have never considered it if I was working at the time (they ended making me a permanent offer after 3 weeks, instead of 6 months, and I really like the place, so it ended up working out).
Indeed, while it might not work in all cases you'd probably save enough time/money to make up for those cases where it didn't work out. I've often seen jobs posted that stay open for 6 months or more because some hiring manager and their team can't make up their minds on who to hire. Meanwhile, the project they want to bring someone in to work on languishes, or people who are already stretched thin burn out and go elsewhere. There's such an emphasis now on hiring the perfect candidate that it's the enemy of actually getting things done.
6 Months is only because that is what contract organizations want - you can buy the good people out sooner, but they need 6 months from people to make their budgets work. 6 months is plenty of time to ensure you know if someone is bad or just slow to get productive, but not too long to pay someone who is not worth it.
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