The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them.
I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between roles before they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and go through the company-wide onboarding and training processes and set up their equipment. Another week.
The first time I actually get to have them do any work is 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual process of firing them is instant once I've decided that it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting from scratch.
I can't believe any company would look at this story (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our candidates."
But we've just established in this thread that even senior people are having difficulty findings jobs. This has nothing to do with desperation. Temp contract works both ways, if an employee doesn't like the company or finds another job within the 2-3 months, they are free to leave. This is more than fair.
Ignoring that this seems like a bad way to start a hopefully long-term relationship, this would largely limit your pool to people who don’t already have a job. If a senior candidate already has a job, why would they give it up for a sketchy 2-3 month contract and the vague promise of full employment?
Relationships between an individual and a corporation are fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal by heavily favouring the single human side.
I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between roles before they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and go through the company-wide onboarding and training processes and set up their equipment. Another week.
The first time I actually get to have them do any work is 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual process of firing them is instant once I've decided that it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting from scratch.
That is incredibly expensive.