Startups: don’t hire people based on job interviews. Part-time work trials are better for everyone.

I’ve hired dozens of people directly and my companies have hired many hundreds more. After my first few hires, I quickly learned that interviews are, at best, only weakly correlated to future job success. At Hubble and now Agora, we almost always try to instead work with late-stage candidates first on a paid part-time or consulting basis to decide if we should hire them full time. Our hiring hit rate has soared.

Why? It’s simple: show, don’t tell. The best way to actually see if someone would work well in your company is … have them work in your company. Instead of someone telling you they’re a hard worker, you can see if they work hard. Instead of someone saying they’re analytical, you can evaluate their analysis. In an interview, candidates also can’t credibly tell you that they’ll work well with the rest of your team. Observing them actually work with other team members lets you know. You get way more direct information than an interview.

Sometimes candidates aren’t willing to work part-time first. Honestly, I consider this a yellow flag (unless of course there are visa, non-compete, or personal reasons that make it impossible). For one, it’s hard to get as much information about these candidates which makes hiring full-time riskier. But also the fact that someone won’t do this is telling for me. Startups especially require people to juggle multiple roles, sometimes work abnormal hours, be entrepreneurial, and be flexible. Willingness to consult for a company–effectively a side hustle if someone else has another full-time job–itself partially demonstrates that someone has these important characteristics.

Many times, part-time job trials also tell you a lot about the role itself, not only the candidate. Quite often, we’ve realized that a role we thought should be full-time really should only be a part-time role or maybe should be taken on by someone else in the company. Or that we didn’t need it at all.

Candidates themselves benefit from first being able to work part-time as well. For all the reasons that companies get more information working with an employee vs. interviewing, potential employees get way more information too. Is the role what they expected / will they enjoy the work? Are they a fit with the company culture? Show, don’t tell.

Is hiring potential candidates expensive and time-consuming? Yes and no. In the short-run, training and paying a greater number of people than you expect to hire full-time isn’t cheap. But it’s a worthwhile investment. Great employees are the lifeblood of any company and a poorly matched employee can really hurt you, especially when you’re small. Improving the hiring process saves you a lot of time and money down the road.

So next time you’re hiring an important full-time role, try working with the candidate part-time first. You’ll learn a lot more than another interview.