evaluate-a-work-trial-request

name	evaluate-a-work-trial-request
category	get-hired
description	Evaluate a hiring work trial for relevance, proportionality, compensation, ownership, privacy, accessibility, and misuse risk. Use when an employer asks a candidate to complete sample work, a take-home task, or a live trial.

evaluate-a-work-trial-request

Separate a fair assessment from unpaid production work.

When to use

• Use before accepting a take-home, live exercise, audition, shift, case, coding task, or portfolio adaptation.
• Local employment, wage, disability, privacy, and intellectual-property rules may require qualified advice.

Procedure

1. Verify the employer, role, requester, stage, stated purpose, task, format, deadline, expected effort, and reviewer.
2. Ask how the task maps to job requirements, how candidates are scored, and whether alternatives or accommodations exist.
3. Determine whether the work uses live customer, company, personal, security-sensitive, or proprietary data.
4. Clarify compensation, expenses, ownership, license, confidentiality, retention, recording, automated analysis, and reuse.
5. Assess proportionality across time, access, equipment, scheduling, disability, caregiving, and financial burden.
6. Look for productive value: would the output replace paid work, solve a current business problem, or be deployed?
7. Propose a bounded synthetic task, redacted sample, paid trial, shorter scope, or existing work when risk is high.
8. Record the agreed scope and submit only through a verified channel with safe metadata and no third-party secrets.
9. Afterward, retain evidence, request deletion or return where agreed, and include the process in employer evaluation.

Failure plan

• Decline requests for payment, credential sharing, production access, illegal work, deceptive customer contact, or unsafe personal data.
• If terms change after work starts, pause and obtain written agreement before continuing.

Done

• A trial assessment records legitimacy, job relevance, effort, compensation, data, ownership, accessibility, reuse, and alternatives
• The accepted scope is written, bounded, safely delivered, and closed with the agreed handling of output and candidate data