A reader writes:
I work as a full-time contractor for a large company as a data analyst. I don’t receive PTO.
I’m interviewing with other companies. Most of the time, these interviews are remote and less than an hour, so I just work from home and don’t tell my company while I interview. However, I have one interview coming up that requires me to take a half day off and interview in-person. Is it appropriate to ask the company I’m interviewing for to compensate me for the time off or will it harm my prospects? For what it’s worth: I’m a mid-career professional and this is a semi-difficult role for them to fill.
It will harm your prospects, and they’re very unlikely to pay you for the time unless they have no other promising candidates, have been unable to fill the job for a while, and are increasingly desperate.
Rightly or wrongly, the convention is that employers don’t pay people to interview. Maybe they should! If we were designing the system from scratch, you could make an argument that candidates should be paid for their time. But that’s not the way the system we have works (just like they also won’t pay for your gas to get to them or the suit they might want you to show up wearing).
You can ask for things that might lower the burden on your side, like scheduling the interview at the start or end of the day to minimize the amount of time you need to take off (or, in some cases, doing an in-person interview remotely instead, particularly early on in the process). But asking to be paid for your time would sound out-of-touch with business conventions.
One exception to this is if you’re asked to do time-intensive work simulations (not like 30 minutes producing a writing sample, but more significant projects) or if an interview process has clearly crossed the line into full-on consulting. For example, I worked somewhere that would pay finalists for one role a freelance fee for a project toward the end of the process — which gave us the deeper look at their work that we wanted, while ensuring they didn’t feel taken advantage of. But just showing up to an interview isn’t going to fall in that category.
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