IANAL but as far as I can see this strategy is not without risk.

After all, they are already being paid on those vacation days, are they not technically working for their existing company?

What happens when your new employee's old company turns round and says 'Hey, we just found out about your wonderful scheme about testing out our employees when they're still under our contract. That means our intellectual property is in your code base. That employee has no negotiation power and you clearly knew that, our price for this bespoke job is $100,000. You've already got the goods, payment terms 1 day. Thanks.'.

I know there are some asshole IP contracts out there, but I think even so a company would have a hard time claiming ownership of a project an employee did for someone else, in his own time.

I don't spend my vacations working for other people. You also can't expect a contractor to be passionate about your company when they have no vested interest in its success.

With all due respect, I'm sure you're great at what you do, but I'd never want you to work for me. I'm on a mission and I'm interested in hiring people who share that mission. If you are solely driven by vested financial interests you wouldn't be a good fit.

And with all due respect to you, you seem to not be considering the employee's point of view at all. An employee exchanges his time for money. It is not fair to assume that because an employee doesn't want to exchange ALL of his time for money that he is not passionate about his work or your company. He could be very passionate about these things but also have other priorities, such as rest and recovery from a full year of work, spending time with his family and friends etc. And, again, with all due respect to you, I don't ever want to work for someone like you. I, and every other healthy social individual, have other priorities besides work. You seem like the kind of person that demands his employees to put in ungodly hours to achieve the goals of your "mission", but I could of course be wrong about that. It would be a service to all us employees at HN if you could drop your company name so we could avoid it if we ever would hear of a position with you.

My company is SproutRobot.com. It's in my profile. You should check out what I'm building and by all means if it's not interesting to you avoid applying for a job. :)

I would never ask people to work without compensation. And I would never ask people to work "ungodly" hours. But I do want to work with people who are really excited about tech and about home gardens, and about making stuff that was impossible possible. Not many companies offer the chance to work on a problem like that, and for some people it's really exciting.

And they should talk to me. I've already had several people offer to work on the project for free just because it interests them and they're looking to explore other career paths.

I actually have never done the "let's do a trial weekend/week contract gig" thing, although I don't understand why you're so vociferously against that approach. Even if it limits me to people who are freelancers.... there are a lot of freelancers out there! And I'm not an unreasonable guy. If someone was excited about SproutRobot I would do everything I could to find a way to get them on board!

But if someone doesn't give a shit, and can't rearrange a couple days, or a weekend to figure out if we're a good fit.... I don't see how I'm a totally evil slavedriver boss if I think that's an indication of a poor fit for my company.

What's so terrible about wanting to hire people who want to go out of their way to work for me?

Edit: And what would you think about a company that required you to fly out for a weekend to do two days of interviews? You wouldn't even get paid for that! You must think that kind of demand is abhorrent if you think hiring someone for two days to get paid to work on the product is evil.

You're really not considering the potential employee here. When interviewing for a job, unless the company is very well known, a Google or a Microsoft, a candidate will probably know relatively little of your company, and probably have no understanding of your mission. How can you expect them to be driven by your mission if they don't know what it is?

You could say the best way for them to find this out is by doing this 3 week contract for hire idea, but that's still a risk to the candidate.

They can visit the web site and look a the product. I think it's a really exciting and unique product. I want to work with people who feel the same way.

Yeah, just because I'm interviewing with you doesn't mean that I'm 100% on board with your "mission" just yet. It took me about two years with my company to really really really get behind what we do and believe that we really are the best at what we do. It took that long because I, by default, probably like most other sane people, don't just trust blindly. The company had to prove itself to me. Trying to hire based on the inverse of that would be misguided.

I'm a little hurt that you're calling me misguided. Have you looked at my business? It's a mission-driven business. The mission is extremely clear. Dozens of people a week tell me they LOVE the mission after spending 1 minute with the site. This isn't some obscure chat client or something. I'm trying to do something real. Anyone who doesn't get excited about that right away is not a good fit. I don't think that's misguided.