It's not a matter of liking real work or not. Of course everyone prefers real work to silly logic puzzles, but that's a false dichotomy. It's about trust and commitment. You're asking your applicants to assume virtually all of the risk in the transaction. They have to either quit their job or violate the terms of employment. They have to go all-in on your company for weeks as opposed to considering multiple offers. This way of hiring may work for the companies that are already highly desirable (though I think it's still cruel), but it's absolutely lousy advice for unproven companies in a competitive hiring environment. You totally don't want to work with bad people. Not at all. So suck it up, hire the people who look promising, and fire them promptly if they don't work out. But absolutely, positively, do not encourage every little startup to strut around like they are doing top talent some sort of favor by even considering them.
You're absolutely correct, and I want to highlight one thing you said: Nobody likes firing people. Every manager I've ever worked with hates firing their employees -- even really bad ones.
What the "audition" is all about is trying to make it so that you don't ever get into a situation where you hire someone, work with them for a month, and say, "Holy shit, this isn't working out at all, I'd better fire this guy."
In France or something, where it's super-hard to fire people, maybe that makes sense. In California, it's mostly about trying to spare the feelings of the manager.
I've found that bad managers tend to be unable to fire people, and one of the things I always tried to gauge when interviewing for a job was if the company was capable of firing.
And, yeah, I've had to fire some people. It really sucks, no matter how deserved (well, I'm talking about just not being able to do the job, vs. "for cause" where it's white line stuff, fortunately never had one of those cases).
I completely get that. I've had to fire people, and it really really sucks. But that's the point: you don't get to externalize that onto your candidates.
"hire the people who look promising, and fire them promptly if they don't work out."
What's the difference between that and a pre-hire, high workload paid assignment?
The only practical difference I see is that the eager employer gives the new employee some false hopes of slight stability, which may cause her to uproot her entire family, e.g. "got a job in city X, honey, we're moving".
