Hi Reader,

Andrew Chen, a General Partner at a16z, recently shared five tips for founders who are hiring their first team after a seed round. As founders ourselves, we think these are great. But as negotiation advisers for job seekers, we find one of these to be very dangerous for your career.

If you’re a job candidate, you want to be careful if a company ever proposes what Andrew suggests in Tip #4.

Andrew's advice is for founders to interview for the actual work. He writes that "the ideal is two months of working together and a checkpoint," with a 3-day "working interview" as a reasonable substitute.

That makes sense for a company that wants to avoid a bad hire. But for you as the candidate, it can wipe out your negotiation leverage.

You're running a process that runs out of time

When you're looking for a job, you're usually interviewing with several companies at the same time. Those parallel conversations are where your leverage comes from.

If one company asks you to work for them for two months (paid, of course) before deciding whether to hire you full-time, most of your other opportunities will fall off. Other companies won't pause their hiring while you wait to see how the two months of trial work went.

Keeping enough options open would take a lot of effort over an extended period, all while working extra hard to impress the people at your new "non-job” job.

What it tells the company

Agreeing to the arrangement not only puts you at a disadvantage with keeping all your opportunities in play, but it also shows the company you may not have better options than to accept a trial period rather than a full-time offer.

The bigger cost comes at conversion. By the time they make you a full-time offer (if they even do!), you most likely won't have other opportunities waiting for you, so you'll be negotiating with very little leverage.

Furthermore, what we often see is companies dragging the conversion conversation over additional weeks or even months. So you may be at the edge of your seat on whether you’ll have a full-time offer and all the benefits that come with it for months on end.

Boiling the frog

A more subtle but dangerous phenomenon we’ve seen that’s worth calling out is that the company will propose a compensation package for the trial period as just temporary while promising to revisit the package if/when you convert to full-time. So the candidate decides to not negotiate until then or negotiates very little.

However, when the time comes to convert to full time, you likely won't have other compelling options and much leverage. Furthermore, because you were willing to accept a relatively low pay, there’s an implied ceiling as to how much more you’ll be paid as a full-time employee. Finally, companies sometimes argue that as a full-time employee, you’ll have many more benefits as a reason to not increase the compensation.

Not to mention that you may be stuck with this subpar compensation package for a longer period of time until the company decides to convert you to full-time, which can take even more weeks or months, and is something you don’t have much leverage on.

Even a few days is a big ask

As it may be obvious by now, we don’t recommend agreeing to the two-month trial. Even a few days of a "working interview" is a big ask for most people, especially if they already have a job and a busy life, or need to start working asap.

Plenty of hiring practices sound good in principle, but note that most of the time these practices are norms that have been reinforced by employers, not employees (we wrote about this here; this will change your mindset, especially if you’re worried that negotiating will risk your offers or relationships!).

So before you agree to a trial period, think through how that impacts your other options and what situation you may end up in down the line.

Warmly,

Gerta & Alex

Founders, YourNegotiations.com

P.S. Are you job searching or have upcoming negotiations?

If you have an offer coming or are mid-process, we’re always happy to help you think through how to approach it. Book a free call here: https://calendly.com/alexhapki/call​

P.P.S. Know someone interested in negotiations?

Send them our way and we’ll thank you with $250 for each person who becomes a client. No cap.

A quick intro or an email to alex@yournegotiations.com works.