>Why do an audition project when you can fire candidates who do not work out within the first three months?

Because then good people won't come work for you.

I would not interview at a company that had a reputation of firing a significant portion of its employees within 3 months. Not just because of the obvious career and financial risk. But because a company that treats its employees as disposable is likely not to be a good place to work in general. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

Well it shouldn't be a high occurrence affair. I mean sure if they keep getting rid of people after 3 months I would avoid that company too. But keeping the option and testing the person over 3 months is pretty standard in every job I've taken. I've only seen it used once and everyone on the team agreed with the decision.

Well, if you end up firing a lot of people, give recruiting to someone who's a better judge of character.

Firing when things do not work out is an honest act. What does it have to do with disposability? Both parties will be better off moving in separate directions.

Also, I don't see how an audition will improve anything.

Life changes are the biggest risk to employees performance. No matter what you do, you are not going to predict life changes during the interview.

>Well, if you end up firing a lot of people, give recruiting to someone who's a better judge of character.

It's not just about judging character. It's about the amount of effort an employer puts into the interviewing and hiring process. Interviewing people well takes effort. But if you're willing to fire someone easily, well, why put in the effort?

In my experience, this feeds back on itself. The more comfortable the employer gets with firing, the sloppier the hiring process gets. Soon good people start avoiding the company, which means mediocre people get interviewed. So the interview standards need to drop further, otherwise no one would get hired at all (and besides, you can just fire them if it doesn't work out, so what's the harm?). Pretty soon you're one of those companies with constant churn, where no one seems to last longer than a year.

>Firing when things do not work out is an honest act. What does it have to do with disposability?

It's not about honesty, it's about empathy. A good employer empathizes enough with the employee enough so that they find firing to be painful, even if the firing is justified. But an employer who cannot, or will not, empathize with their employee basically treats their employee as a thing. And if they treat employees as things when it comes to firing, they'll treat them as things all the time. Which is an excellent way to create a terrible work environment.

But how an audition will improve anything? The marginal improvement in the new hire quality that you get from doing an audition is not worth the time and money spent on auditions plus the cost of lost candidates who took offers that did not require auditions.

Actually, I'm not advocating auditions. I'm also really not a fan of the StackOverflow/GitHub/you-shouldn't-have-a-life-outside-of-coding approach either. But just because that approach is overkill doesn't mean that interviews should be be treated lightly (and I think treating interviews lightly is unavoidable if an employer considers firing to be a routine tool).

I lose an enormous amount of time spinning up a developer. That's expected, and not a problem, but not something to be taken lightly.

This is often times the case. However, you loose several weeks doing the audition and you loose a few good candidates who took the offers that did not require the audition.

Hiring someone as an employee has a large administrative cost, as does firing. Whereas contracting a project has very little overhead.

Additionally, firing someone is hard from an emotional perspective. It will damage team morale and puts the person you fired in a bad position.

Why not? Sadly, because we live in a litigious society.

It's not always that simple. What if that person quit their last job to come work here? Quit and moved across the country? Gave up other promising opportunities?

I'm not saying you can't fire people, but unless a trial period is explicitly agreed upon beforehand, there's an expectation that a job will last more than a couple of months if the new employee is putting in real effort. I don't know where to draw the line, but even an employee who isn't a dick might sue if they rearranged their life only to be let go two months later; I'd argue that they also deserve to win.

I absolutely agree, the trial period should be discussed up front. Full disclosure.

There will always be special cases.