You can run four rounds of interviews, a take-home, and three reference calls, and still not know whether someone is good until you watch them work for two weeks. That gap between what interviews tell you and what the job reveals is why the paid trial exists. For your first engineering hire, where a bad call can cost you a quarter and a rebuild, it is one of the most underused ways to buy down risk.
Why the interview does not tell you enough
Interviews test how someone performs in an interview. That is correlated with the job, but loosely. The take-home has its own problems, which I have written about in why the take-home test stopped working: strong candidates refuse to do unpaid work, and the ones who complete it are self-selecting for having free time, not for being good.
A paid trial fixes both problems at once. You watch the person do the actual work, on your actual codebase or a real slice of it, and you pay them their normal rate for the time. You learn things no interview surfaces: how they handle an ambiguous ticket, whether they ask the right questions before writing code, how they respond when they hit something they do not understand, whether their pull requests are readable, and whether working with them feels like relief or friction. Founders consistently tell me they learned more in the first three days of a trial than in the entire interview loop that preceded it.
What a trial is not
A trial is not a way to get cheap labor or to dodge a real offer. If you treat it as unpaid spec work or string people along with a vague "maybe," strong candidates walk, and they are right to. It is also not a substitute for having decided what you want. If the trial ticket is mush, you learn nothing except that your own scoping is mush. The trial is a genuine, paid, well-defined trial run of the working relationship, with a clear decision at the end.
How to structure a paid trial that works
Keep it short and real. A well-scoped paid trial runs one to two weeks, paid at the candidate's normal contract rate. If the person is currently employed, that means evenings and a weekend, or a block of vacation, so keep the scope honest about how many hours you are actually asking for. For a contract-to-hire arrangement where the person is between roles, the trial can stretch to a month, and full contract-to-hire engagements sometimes run one to three months before a full-time offer. Shorter is usually better: two weeks of real work tells you almost everything a month would.
Pick a real ticket, not a toy. The best trial task is something from your actual backlog that a new hire would plausibly own in their first month: a self-contained feature, a bug that requires understanding the code, an integration. It should be big enough to require judgment and small enough to finish. Give them the same access, context, and support a real hire would get, because you are testing the working relationship, not their ability to work in a vacuum.
Agree the terms in writing up front. Rate, hours, scope, IP assignment, and - this is the part founders skip - the decision at the end. Say plainly: at the end of two weeks we both decide whether to move to a full-time offer, and either side can say no. That clarity protects the candidate and forces you to actually decide. The contractor-versus-employee structure matters here too; if you are unsure how to set up the engagement cleanly, I covered that in your first engineer does not have to be an employee.
Reading the trial honestly
At the end, judge the work, not your relief that the search is over. Did they ship something real? Did they ask good questions or guess? Was their code something you would want a stranger to inherit? Did they make you faster or did you spend the two weeks explaining? A trial only de-risks the hire if you are willing to end it with a no. If you have already decided to hire them regardless, you did not run a trial, you ran an expensive onboarding. The whole value is that the answer is genuinely open until the work comes in.
FAQ
How long should a paid trial for an engineer be?
One to two weeks at the candidate's normal rate is the sweet spot for someone currently employed. For a between-roles contract-to-hire, a month is reasonable, and full contract-to-hire engagements sometimes run one to three months. Longer rarely tells you more than a well-scoped two weeks does.
Do I have to pay for a trial?
Yes. Strong candidates will not do meaningful work for free, and unpaid trials select for the desperate rather than the good. Paying their normal rate also signals that you take their time seriously, which matters when they are choosing between offers.
What should the trial task be?
A real ticket from your backlog that a new hire would plausibly own in month one: a self-contained feature, a meaningful bug, or an integration. Big enough to require judgment, small enough to finish in the time. Avoid contrived puzzles - you want to see them do the actual job.
Is a paid trial legal and clean to set up?
Yes, structured as a short paid contract with clear scope, rate, hours, and IP assignment in writing. Decide up front whether they are a contractor or a W-2 for the trial period and document it. The engagement structure is worth getting right before day one, not after.
If you want a second opinion on how to scope a trial or read its result before you make the offer, book a call.