The pandemic has left lots of people unemployed, including many UX professionals. Some companies are taking advantage of this situation to automate and scale their recruiting. (Historically this has been called “carpetbagging“, and it hasn’t gone away.) I have seen one company even make the completion of unpaid work part of their application process: after an initial screening interview with a third-party recruiter, the applicant is sent a link to Usertesting.com, where he or she is asked to watch a video of a user interacting with the company’s software and then evaluate the session. Applicants are not compensated for this work, which the recruiter told me takes about three quarters of an hour.
Forty-five minutes of uncompensated work in exchange for a shot at a steady job might seem like an okay deal for someone just entering the field, or who is for other reasons desperate. But if ten people go through this process, then the company has received 7.5 hours of free labor. If 100 people go through this process, then they have received nearly two weeks of free labor. It becomes easy to see how the incentives become misaligned.
When the prospect of being hired is drastically reduced, going through an application process like this is an unambiguously negative experience. Luckily, quality UX candidates have a passion for improving experiences. They want to work somewhere they can put this passion to use, which means a place where their recommendations will be taken seriously. A company that persists in putting people through bad experiences will ultimately fail to attract quality candidates; it’s a vicious cycle.
The unpaid work I described above was ostensibly meant to show the company how the candidate evaluates a usability session. Here are two alternatives to that kind of recruiting method:
- Pay applicants for the time they spend evaluating your usability sessions. That at least keeps the incentives more aligned and steers clear of unethical “carpetbagging” practices.
- Talk to candidates instead. Quality candidates will be willing to spend time interviewing, because an interview gives them visibility into the process they’re participating in, realtime feedback about how they’re doing, and a personal sense of who they’re going to be working with.
Nadav Zohar 