And what percentage of people do you "drop"? I imagine once you spend a week with someone you might get attached to them enough that it would be hard to let them go for something subjective unless they were a pretty big asshole.
As far as the "unemployed" part goes, things aren't usually as cut-and-dried as that. Of those five, one was on the verge of being laid off, and one was a student. The other three were gainfully employed. Being open to working weekends with candidates makes this much more possible, though more lengthy.
We're pretty proud of who we are. If your desire to work with us is strong enough, you'll find a way. And if you do find a way under difficult circumstances, it says volumes about your personal drive.
The approach may work for you, but most companies seem to have the idea that they are special, when they really aren't - and frankly most people wouldn't accept your requirements unless they where truly desperate so you will likely have to change your approach as you grow.
Hiring should be at least as important to the team as to any manager. (After all, they're the ones who have to "live with" the new hire.) I can see this working if the team is flexible enough to accomodate the potential employee's current work schedule, assuming the potential is also flexible enough to take on the extra load for a bit.
If you are in the U.S. I hope you've had this hiring process reviewed by your legal counsel. Given the brief description above you are quite possibly violating several federal employment laws in addition to IRS rules on what constitutes a contractor vs an employee.
We send out the necessary W-9s and everything. Effectively, our candidates are freelancers until we hire them... and we pay our freelancers according to IRS rules.
You now update to say you pay your "freelancers" however in your first post you say you take your accountants advice on paying as an employee or a contractor. Those are two extremely different things and back dating employment (via pay as an employee during the trial period) would have the end result of your company incurring liability for failing to complete employment paperwork in a timely manner among other things. You could also open yourself to liability for discrimination and other issues if you tried to pay someone as an employee, started the hiring paperwork and then found out the individual did not have valid work authorization.
Just to say it one more time so there's no confusion. This is not legal advice. Anyone considering anything in the content of this message or implementing the parent posters hiring process should speak to legal counsel before doing so.
With a moment of clarity, I do recall our employees having to go through the W-9 process. In addition, not all work was "under the company umbrella." For example, if a candidate paired with an employee during a users group hack night, that was taken into consideration. Like I said, rules are made to be bent.
As to other hiring practices your comment on pay specifically raised a red flag with me if for no other reason than if you paid someone for work as an employee you'd be back dating their date of hire (as far as the government is concerned). My day job is with a company specializing in a very tiny portion of the hiring process and we see large and small companies screw it up every day. The M-247 Handbook for Employers is nearly 70 pages about how to fill out nothing more than the Federal I-9 Form. Screwing up that process can generate civil and criminal liability at the federal level. Then if you are in a state that has additional restrictions (Colorado and more coming soon) you could be incurring even more liability. Have federal contracts and get this process wrong? Potentially kiss them goodbye thanks to the FAR clause.
M-274 Handbook for Employers: http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/m-274.pdf
There are a lot of potential pitfalls employers face and it's unfortunate that the government does a pretty poor job of making it clear what the employers responsibilities are as well as consistently enforcing the rules that are on the books.
I want to be clear, I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything like that. Based solely on your initial comment I would be concerned about your hiring practice and make sure your counsel doesn't see anything wrong with it. If you are bringing in 100% of the people for a trial basis as contractors and meet the IRS rules you may have nothing to worry about. If you bring one person on under that methodology described (as a backdated employee) you could have some liability sitting in your employee records that you can't fix.
The other issue for the employed in that scenario is that their employment contracts may prohibit moonlighting/contracting or have a non compete that would interfere with the trail/interview process.
If we don't hire you, we pay you as a contractor for your time. If we do hire you, we pay you either as an employee or contractor for your time (depending on what our accountant says).
We'll bend the rules depending on circumstances, but basically you're not getting in unless you spend 30 hours pairing with our devs. Anything else, I propose, can be hazardous to the culture and effectiveness of your company.