We Paid A Candidate To Spend A Day Working With Us, Here’s How It Went

It can feel incredibly challenging to hire, and hire well.

For one thing, hiring is usually a significant time investment for our small team — we once had 1,500 applications in just over a week for a content role (!!) — but beyond that, we are so intentional about the ways that we collaborate.

Buffer is a fully remote, global, and culturally diverse company operating with a four-day work week. Finding someone who will thrive in our work environment, and is also highly skilled in the areas we’re hiring for, can be tough.

So in a recent hiring round, we decided to try something new.

I asked a candidate who was in the final stages of interviewing to spend a full day working with us across Zoom and Slack. They would be working on real projects relevant to the role, and they’d get a chance to work alongside the rest of their potential future team.

My hope was that this day of working together would give the hiring team a clearer picture of how the candidate works, communicates, and collaborates.

To my delight, the candidate was thrilled to participate! And, of course, we paid them for their time.

Read on for more details and what we learned for next time.

Why we decided to try a full day of collaborating

Over the years we’ve refined our application process and it’s been fairly successful for us. We ask pretty non-standard questions — things like, “Tell us about something - anything - you’re passionate about” —that help us get a feel for who a person is.

I’ve always appreciated that we aren’t only asking about work experience given that we’re looking for true value-alignment with the rest of the Buffer team. I realize this is a high bar, but it also creates a high-trust environment when we are all truly operating from the same place and energized by the same mission.

But even with multiple hiring rounds, it can be hard to get to know how someone is going to show up at work and collaborate with the rest of the team. It is one thing to say you value transparency in an interview, and another to truly work transparently with your team.

We’ve also done take-home assignments as well. I know this is a contentious topic — but my opinion is you just need to see someone’s work in many roles, especially senior ones.

Take-home assignments have frequently helped us spot who might be the best fit early on. Out of respect for candidates’ time, I always keep them brief — but taking the middle ground here means that there are limits on how much you get to see of someone’s work.

The other factor, of course, is AI. Our applications tend to be writing heavy, and having solid written communication is important to us as that’s the main way we speak and work with each other. In the age of AI, we found a huge number of applications where it was clear the candidate used AI exclusively to answer questions. In other cases, it can be hard to determine what is human and genuine.

This most recent hiring round was a perfect opportunity to try something new. I was in the unique position of bringing a candidate in to interview with us who had been a finalist in another hiring round. I didn’t want to put this candidate through our whole hiring process again — they had already been through those stages — but of course, it felt important to get to know this person better since it had been a few months.

Our Chief of Staff, Caro Kopprasch, has been keen to shake things up with our hiring process, due to the challenges mentioned above with AI, and the gaps between interviewing and a full-time role. We brainstormed a small experiment (based on lessons learned from our collective 20+ years doing hiring at Buffer!).

We decided to spend the day working together with the candidate in Slack to get a real feel for how this person would truly collaborate. The candidate was fully on board, and fortunately for us all, it went very well!

How our first Collaboration Day went

We called this day of work “Collaboration Day” and it was such a fun and insightful experience. I find one of the most fun parts of hiring is getting to know people and daydreaming about how well that person would work on the team and propel projects. Collaboration Day made those dreams come true!

First of all, as I mentioned — this was a paid interview. We paid the candidate $400 for the full day, and we plan to pay all future candidates the same for a full day to keep it fair. The candidate took a day off of work, and on our side, we set aside a lot of time so that we could focus on collaborating.

I planned out the structure of the day to include two main projects, and I let the candidate know what they were in advance. From there, I invited the candidate to a Slack channel set up specifically for this purpose.

I wanted the day to balance live brainstorming calls with working in docs, having conversations in comments, and coordinating back-and-forth in Slack. This was a tough balance, and there was a lot to fit in. In hindsight, I could have likely kept it to just one project.

It was a very full day, and it went by faster than expected. We had an initial call to say hi and do our first live brainstorm together, and we also did a call to close out the day, hear how it all felt, and chat next steps.

From our side, it went incredibly well. Four people from the hiring team got way more overlap with this candidate, saw how they worked, collaborated, asked questions, shared ideas, and executed on ideas and projects. When we were reflecting on how the day went, we all had so much more context around what areas we felt solid and where we would want to ask more questions and get clarity.

After Collaboration Day, this candidate was moved to the final interview that all candidates have before they potentially receive an offer — an interview with our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, and our Chief of Staff, Caro Kopprasch.

What we learned for next time

Overall, this first iteration was a success. On the practical side, I would definitely scale back to one project in the future to ensure there’s enough time to make meaningful progress, and also to allow for a lot of time in Slack or other written tools, since that was one of the main areas we wanted to assess.

Ultimately, what we learned is that having a full day of collaboration with a potential candidate was a fun and effective way to assess how someone collaborates. It made us feel extra confident when we reached the offer stage that we were making the right decision.

To sneak in some extra fun news right at the end — this candidate received an offer, and accepted! We can’t wait to share more about this new Buffer teammate soon.