While I was job-hunting I asked two companies that had already offered me a place to wait about three weeks for my answer. I wanted a "trial employment" stint at all costs. The reason is simple: actually doing the work during a trial stint would let me choose a company with far more confidence than talking in an interview ever could.
We run "trial employment" as part of hiring here. After two interviews, you work with us for a few days (up to five) at an hourly rate, and we hire once both sides have checked there is no gap between us. I joined that way myself. (It is coming up on six months since my first trial day.)
Trial employment is not, I think, a common step in a hiring process, so let me write up my impressions before the memory fades.
What the trial stint involved
In my case, the trial stint went roughly like this:
- an explanation of the company
- setting up accounts
- setting up a development environment
- getting up to speed on how Odoo thinks and its basic operation
- raising and reviewing a pull request on a project
- writing a forum article (https://www.quartile.co/forum/1/faq)
Setting up the development environment took under a day, helped along by AI, and after that I remember pouring the time into getting to grips with Odoo and writing the article.
After the stint ended — though I had decided early on in it — I said I wanted to join, and was duly hired.
(I spent the wages on a solo trip to Shanghai.)
What the trial stint was like
My overall impression was: the feeling of floundering on someone else's turf. But fun.
I had simply never touched Odoo, and I was no expert on ERP either. There was a five-day limit, and every move I made fed into the decision on whether to hire me. Making an impression good enough that someone would want to hire me under those conditions was hard. On the other hand, I think that kind of trial and error is a sort of growing pain. A bit of pain is needed to grow, and taking today's pain as what builds the future me made it enjoyable too.
One phrase from the trial stint stuck with me: "produce output".
As you work through a task, show us what you thought and what came of it.
Put like that it is obvious — nobody can assess you without seeing what you did, and there is no point for the customer either unless something comes out of it.
But understanding the words is one thing; I found the actual flow of feeling my way through a trial stint and producing output despite not knowing much genuinely hard. I doubt this is only me: told to "produce output" on something new, few people can just do it straight off.
You produce output, get feedback, and correct course. You fix what was lacking and put it out again. Over and over. There is always going to be a gap between the picture the candidate has and the picture the company has, and I came to see this as the process needed to close it.
In my case, when I wrote a forum article introducing a module, I thought I had done a reasonable job of it — and got thoroughly torn apart. The feedback picked out inaccuracies that came from my thin grasp of Odoo and the domain, and a lack of the reader's perspective.
Normally that might be the point where you deflate, but the fact that this feedback made me want to push harder instead was perhaps one of the things that decided me on joining.
That said, I don't imagine everyone feels this way. Plenty of candidates have done a trial stint, felt the culture was not for them, and not joined.
Put like that it may sound harsh, but from a candidate's point of view I think the hard work of getting feedback and correcting course somewhere a little tougher than you are used to is a hundred times better than joining, breaking inside straight away and leaving.
The habit the trial stint gave me — produce output, then correct course — carries over directly into how I work now. Even on a slightly difficult task: fix on the goal, get something out, and close in on it as the feedback comes. Facing customers works the same way.
Because the trial stint let me anticipate what would be expected of me, my picture of myself at work became overwhelmingly clearer than at any other company, and that is what decided me on Quartile. Without it, I might well have been working with a large gap to live with. (Apparently "a gap between what I wanted to do and the job" comes up often as a reason for leaving.)
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"Floundering on someone else's turf. But fun." My trial-employment stint