This is something that’s been a revelation for me with Mayday. In the TV industry, shows will record a pilot that they shop around to get the commission and budget to record the planned series. In startups, we’re (hopefully) well versed in building minimum viable products (MVPs) to test market need. We test channels to market so that we can invest behind them. We prepare to be wrong. But I at least, didn’t previously apply the same principle to recruitment.
We do tasks, interviews and reference checks as part of a recruitment process. We then make an offer. Yes we’ll likely have a probation period as part of the ensuing contract. But by that point we’ve already passed a tipping point in terms of sunk cost fallacy. That person is officially part of the team. It is a ruction to extricate. And that’s before we get into the ego implications of needing to acknowledge a mis-hire.
With Mayday, I realise we’ve inadvertently come to practice minimum viable recruitment. With the pilot as the vehicle for that. It is proving an invaluable way to (mutually) test and make a better hiring decision, with more objectivity.
What is the Paid Pilot?:
A paid piece of work. Above token, but not above deminimis, cost as it’s not primarily about that person earning money. It is an opportunity for us both to validate working with each other;
Example tasks we’ve used include: creating social media posts, preparing a contained piece of content and doing a day’s pair programming together
We get some work from the pilot but that is not enough justification alone for doing it - the primary reason is to mutually learn if it’s a fit
We’re finding we get invaluable insight into Right Person, Right Role, Right Stage. It provides perspective on that person’s Integrity, Ability, Standards and Reliability. You learn about the intensity that they bring to their work with the speed with which they independently move things forward. You learn about their communication. You learn how they respond to criticism. The mark of a successful innovation is that you wonder how you got by without it. The paid pilot is a huge success by that yardstick.
A few points alongside this:
A paid pilot still comes with a cost. The monetary cost. But especially time distraction for the manager and other members of the team. So it’s only worth doing at a very advanced stage of the process;
Someone with a full time job and family is going to find it harder to make time for a paid pilot. Harder but not impossible. Potentially it will need to be a smaller task. Potentially you might need to pay more so they can take a day’s holiday;
A paid pilot is not always useful. For example, if you’ve worked with someone before. You’ve already got what you would get from the pilot. You’ve just watched it on a different channel.