Over $60,000. That’s the amount invested over 4 years by Zeffy, the fundraising software for nonprofits, to… pay the people who complete the company’s case study during its recruitment process. A look at a practice that’s far from the norm.
“I think it’s one of the best expenses we’ve ever made,” François de Kerret, Zeffy’s co-founder and CEO, said on LinkedIn.
Specifically, each candidate receives more than $500 (or €350).
“It mattered to us as a team, because we know that work time has value. And we want candidates to feel comfortable giving it their all,” says François de Kerret. “If you want to recruit top talent, you can’t ask them to invest 5 hours of their time for free. And taking care of your candidates is also a strong signal about how you treat your team.”
He notes in the comments on his post that Zeffy uses a fictional case “so it’s never reused as actual work,” and that the payment amount is fixed regardless of how well candidates perform. He also notes that the case study only comes up at the 3rd stage of recruitment, after two earlier rounds of filtering.
A Strong Signal Sent
Unsurprisingly, the post sparked a wave of positive comments. “Great initiative! Really. I recently went through two recruitment processes where I was asked, in the final stage, to complete very in-depth case studies. In the end, the positions were ‘cancelled’… but the ideas were indeed put to use. (…) Respect has to go both ways,” commented Kathleen.
“Beyond the pay, it’s really the signal it sends that strikes me as powerful. How an organization treats its candidates often says a lot about how it goes on to treat its employees,” wrote Laurence.
This approach is (very) far from being the norm in the working world, though it isn’t an isolated case either. American software company Buffer, for instance, pays candidates who come spend a day at the company for a “Collaboration Day,” to see how the person actually works. American search engine DuckDuckGo also says it pays for its assessments ($150 for the first, $500 for the second).
Still, that’s a drop in the bucket in a professional world that often struggles to fully value candidates’ time. According to a study titled “Recruitment process: 7 key steps to engage candidates,” published in December 2023, the large majority of candidates (82%) feel they don’t receive enough feedback after a job interview.
What’s more, three-quarters of respondents find that recruitment processes drag on too long… and 40% have already given up on a position they were interested in because of that length.
The 4-Hour Limit
Worse still, according to a study conducted in Australia, 45% of companies surveyed admit to having reused work produced by candidates. And more than half of candidates see unpaid case studies as unfair.
This raises the question of where the line falls between evaluating a person and getting their work for free. Social media is full of accounts of this kind of abuse.
According to recruitment software Join, in line with commonly cited best practices, any exercise exceeding four hours should be paid. This improves both the candidate experience and the employer brand, while sending a positive signal to the market.
Some food for thought for your next round of hiring?
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