Hiring the Right Employees: Trial Employment, Social Networks, and Post-Entry Outcomes

Research suggests that finding and hiring the right workers may be as important to firms as managing workers after they join organizations.  However, hiring the right workers is difficult.  In this paper trial employment is examined as a way to attenuate these difficulties.  Similar to the benefits of networks in overcoming information asymmetry, trial employment is argued to advance a more informed understanding of the match between employees and firms prior to hiring decisions being made.  This hypothesis is examined using a novel data set of several thousand workers at a large sales organization.  The results suggest the benefits of trial employment over more traditional forms of hiring.