Weeks Trial For Graduate Job

[GeorgeSmiley1969]

DS went for interview for engineering job and they said he would need to have a weeks trial.

Trial week was last week and they told him that they will let him know in 3 weeks time as at least 1 other person is getting a trial.

The trial is unpaid although they did put him up in a Travelodge.

Is this an exploitative employer or is this just the way if the world these days ?

Nope. I wouldn’t do this. It is exploitative. If they are interested they should pay him for the week.

Wow. No that’s certainly not normal - massively exploitative. I’d be seeking advice from ACAS and possibly HMRC for nonpayment of wages.

I feel it’s exploitative.

But this is the 3rd time I’ve heard this in the last month. Neither of the other candidates got the jobs they done the ‘trial’ for. These were first time jobs too, both in finance.

Unless he actually wants the job, in which case you probably just have to suck it up.

Unfortunately if the employment rights bill is passed this kind of thing is likely to become much more common, as making a mistake on a new hire will be much harder to reverse.

Never heard of this for a grad job - trial shifts in retail/bar/hospitality seem normal.
My DS had so many rounds of tests and interviews when he was applying for his first grad jobs, that I think asking for a week of unpaid work would have been too much.

I work in finance and have done plenty of graduate hiring. In my firm we do eight week (fully paid) trials for most of our grads. We call it an internship but it’s basically a trial period. It costs tens of thousands of pounds to give a new graduate even initial training so we want to get it right.

If it’s any comfort, this is highly unlikely to be exploitative, because he’s almost certainly not doing any useful work. I don’t think new grads in finance can normally contribute anything useful for at least three months. Even then, the time and energy senior, expensive people are spending training them probably outweighs the value they contribute. The payback period on the effort you put into training them is almost always several years - in other words if they leave after a year or two you will have put much more into them than you ever got out. So you want to avoid that by hiring suitable people who will cope with the work and stick around for a while.

I’ve seen it in engineering roles for larger companies like network rail if memory serves. It is exploitative in my opinion but it isn’t unheard of - assuming that it’s for a student, where it’s technically a placement or an internship. Otherwise NMW applies.

Also the employment rights bill won’t make it harder to sack terrible new starts, that’s a myth.

Absolutely agree with this - new grads cost us a fortune, they use a lot of other staff time and aren't producing anything worthwhile for at least 6 months - we might break even on them after a year. We've stopped recruiting grads - they are just too expensive.