Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / Why Unpaid Trial Tasks Are Sabotaging Your Hiring
Transcript
- Lucas: You apply for a job. The company loves your resume. They ask you to complete a 'short test project' — unpaid, eight to ten hours, they say. If you're like most top candidates, you hang up right there. Luna: Yeah, I've done that. I remember once spending a whole weekend building a mock marketing campaign. Didn't even get a rejection email. Lucas: That's exactly what a 2025 study from the recruiting platform Applied found. Companies that require unpaid trial tasks lose 34 percent of in-demand candidates before they even get to a first interview. And the candidates who do complete them? They're 20 percent less likely to accept an offer, because the process already feels exploitative. Luna: Thirty-four percent — that's huge. And those are the people you want most. The ones with options. Lucas: Right. The study surveyed over 1,200 professionals in tech, marketing, and product management. For senior roles — people with eight-plus years experience — the drop-off was even steeper. Forty-one percent said they'd withdraw their application if asked to do an unpaid task. Luna: So why do companies keep doing it? I mean, I get the logic — you want to see real skills, not just talk. But the execution is brutal. Lucas: The logic is actually sound in theory. A well-designed work sample test is one of the best predictors of job performance — better than interviews, better than reference checks. The problem is almost never the test itself. It's that companies treat it as free labor instead of a structured assessment. Luna: And they make it long. I've seen 'short projects' that are basically a week of work. Lucas: Exactly. There's a great counterexample from Buffer, the social media scheduling company. A few years ago they replaced their unpaid trial tasks with a paid, two-day simulation. Candidates get a flat fee — I think it was $200 at the time — and they work on a realistic project with actual team members. Buffer reported a 22 percent increase in offer acceptance rates for senior engineering roles after the change. Luna: Twenty-two percent. So paying people a couple hundred dollars actually saved them money in the long run, because they weren't losing top candidates mid-process. Lucas: That's the key insight. The cost of the stipend is tiny compared to the cost of a failed hire or a prolonged search. And there's another angle — legal risk. In 2024, the Department of Labor issued new guidance under the Fair Labor Standards Act clarifying that unpaid trial tasks for for-profit companies likely violate minimum wage laws if the work provides any value to the employer. Luna: Right, because the candidate is essentially doing productive work. If that mock campaign actually gets used, or that code gets shipped, you've just had someone work for free. Lucas: Exactly. The DOL guidance specifically calls out 'tryouts' that go beyond a short, supervised skills test. They say anything more than a couple of hours under close observation should be paid. And a few class-action lawsuits have already been filed — mostly in California and New York — from candidates who completed projects that companies later used in their actual products. Luna: So companies are exposed on both ends — losing good candidates and risking litigation. What's the alternative? Because I do think there's value in seeing someone's work before you hire them. Lucas: There are a few good options. One is the paid simulation model Buffer uses. Another is a structured, time-boxed task that's clearly distinct from real work — like a 45-minute case study you do during the interview, with the interviewer watching. It's not about the output, it's about the process. Luna: Yeah. So you're testing problem-solving, not getting a free deliverable. Lucas: Right. And you can also use portfolio reviews or take-home assignments that are explicitly stated as non-proprietary — the candidate owns the work, and you never use it internally. Some companies, like the design firm IDEO, have long used paid 'paid trials' where candidates join the team for a day and get a contractor rate. It's a mutual interview. Luna: That flips the power dynamic, doesn't it? Instead of the company saying 'prove yourself to us,' it's more like 'let's see if we work well together.' Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of move that signals respect. Candidates talk. On Glassdoor, on Blind, on Reddit. Companies get reputations for exploitative hiring processes. One post about a six-hour unpaid task can spread fast. Luna: I've seen it. There's a whole subreddit called r/recruitinghell where people share horror stories. Unpaid trial tasks are a recurring theme. Lucas: And it's not just junior roles. The Applied study found that even for director-level positions, 28 percent of candidates cited unpaid tasks as a dealbreaker. So the more senior the role, the more leverage the candidate has, and the more damage a bad process does to your employer brand. Luna: So what's the bottom line for a hiring manager listening right now? If you currently use unpaid trial tasks, what's the first step? Lucas: Audit your process. Look at the tasks you're asking candidates to do. Are they genuinely necessary to evaluate skills? Or could you get the same signal from a structured interview or a portfolio review? If the task takes more than two hours, it should probably be paid. If it produces work you might actually use, it must be paid — legally. Luna: And if you're worried about losing the ability to assess real skills, just remember Buffer's numbers. Paying $200 per candidate might feel like an expense, but losing 34 percent of your top applicants is a much bigger cost. Lucas: Look, I know a lot of people listening are practitioners — recruiters, HR pros, hiring managers — and you're under pressure to make good hires fast. Unpaid tasks feel like a shortcut to quality. But the data says they're actually a filter that screens out the very people you want most. Luna: And if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way — given you a framework, a data point, a new way to think about a problem — a handful of listeners already chip in monthly to keep this show ad-free. It's at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Totally optional, but that's literally what makes it possible to produce this many episodes. Lucas: Appreciate that. And it's true — listener support is the only reason we don't have ads interrupting these conversations. So thank you to everyone who's already part of that. Luna: Yeah, it means a lot. Okay, back to the topic. One more thing I want to touch on — the difference between a trial task and a probation period. Because some companies confuse the two. Lucas: Great point. A probation period is after you're hired. You're on the payroll, you're getting benefits, you have legal protections. A trial task is pre-hire, unpaid, and often unregulated. They're completely different things. And some companies try to use unpaid internships or 'trainee' labels to justify tasks that are really just free work. Luna: And those internships have their own legal issues, especially after the DOL's 2024 guidance. But that's a whole other episode. Lucas: It is. For now, the takeaway is simple: if you're asking candidates to do work before they're hired, make sure it's short, structured, and either paid or clearly non-productive. Your employer brand — and your legal team — will thank you. Luna: And your candidates will too. Which, in a tight labor market, is the whole point. Lucas: Exactly. That's it for this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo. We'll be back with another angle on Tuesday.