Should You Add a Work Sample to This Hire? A Decision Framework for Managers

Your final two candidates for an operations lead role both look credible on paper. One explains past projects with unusual clarity in the interview. The other is less polished verbally, but their application shows several adjacent roles. The hiring team’s unresolved question is practical: this person will spend much of the first six months turning messy requests into clear priorities and written decisions. Should you add a case exercise before choosing?

Many teams answer yes because a work sample feels safer than an interview. Others avoid one because they worry about candidate time, inconsistency, or the effort needed to score it fairly. Both reactions can produce a weak process. A work sample is useful when it gives you direct evidence of an important part of the job that a conversation cannot reliably reveal. It is a poor addition when it merely recreates work the candidate will be taught, asks for free consulting, or becomes an unscored extra round.

The decision is not “interview versus task.” It is: what evidence is missing, and what is the lightest fair method for getting it? For some requirements, a structured interview is the better tool. For others, a short job-relevant exercise earns its place. Start by separating the work people must do on arrival from the qualities you are hoping to sense.

Begin with the decision the new hire will make

Hiring teams often begin with a list of traits: strategic, resilient, collaborative, commercially minded. Those words may describe someone valuable, but they do not tell you what to assess or how. Start instead with a decision the person will repeatedly make in the role.

For the operations lead, that might be: “Given incomplete requests from three teams, decide what must happen this week, what needs clarification, and what can wait.” For a senior customer success manager, it could be: “Respond to an account at risk without promising something the company cannot deliver.” For a financial analyst, it may be: “Identify what a leader can and cannot conclude from an incomplete data set.”

This shift matters because it gives the team something observable. A candidate need not think exactly as the current manager thinks. They do need to show a defensible way of handling the constraints that will actually recur in the job.

A sound process begins with job analysis: identifying important work behaviors and the knowledge and skills connected to successful performance. That remains a central recommendation in SIOP’s statement on fair, merit-based selection procedures. For a hiring manager, this does not require a lengthy research project. It requires a 30-minute working session before interviews begin: list the three or four decisions that distinguish solid performance from costly rework.

The distinction is simple. Use a work sample to see a candidate perform an entry-level job task or make a role-specific judgment. Use a structured interview to understand how they handled past complexity, learned unfamiliar systems, influenced others, or made choices across situations that cannot be reasonably recreated in a short exercise.

That is consistent with the way the U.S. Office of Personnel Management describes the methods: work samples ask applicants to perform tasks that mirror actual work, while structured interviews use standardized, job-linked questions and common rating standards. OPM’s overview of work samples and simulations also makes an important boundary clear: they fit best when candidates are expected to arrive with the capability being assessed. Do not test an internal process you plan to teach in week one and then mistake unfamiliarity for inability.

Choose the smallest assessment that resolves the uncertainty

Once the team can name the missing evidence, it can decide whether an exercise is proportionate. This is where many hiring processes become heavier than they need to be. A work sample should resolve a real uncertainty after application review and interviews—not compensate for a vague job description or a panel that has not agreed on its criteria.

Ask three questions in order.

1. Is this work central and recurrent? If the candidate will make the judgment once a year, a simulation is rarely worth building. If they will make it every week, direct evidence is more valuable.
2. Can a structured interview produce enough evidence? If panelists can ask about a real past situation, probe tradeoffs, and score the answer against defined behaviors, another task may add little.
3. Can the task be completed and scored fairly in a limited time? If the team cannot explain the task, time expectation, inputs, and scoring method in advance, it is not ready to send.

Consider a product marketing hire. The team says it needs someone “strategic.” That label hides two separate needs. First, the person must write a clear launch brief from imperfect inputs. Second, they must build alignment among product, sales, and design when priorities conflict. A 35-minute brief exercise can show information selection, audience awareness, and the ability to state an open question. A structured interview can explore an actual disagreement: who was involved, what the candidate did, what they would change, and how they knew whether the decision held up. One method should not be forced to answer both questions.

Structured does not mean stiff. It means every finalist receives the same core questions, in the same order, with agreed follow-ups where needed and the same rating standards. OPM’s structured-interview guidance describes this common-question, common-scale approach as a way to give candidates equal opportunity to provide relevant information. It also prevents the usual problem in which one candidate gets a rich conversation and another gets a quick factual check.

A work sample should answer one important hiring question that a structured interview cannot answer well enough.

Design an exercise that tests work, not endurance

A useful work sample is narrow. It supplies enough context for a reasonable decision, removes confidential material, and asks for an output that resembles the role. It does not ask finalists to solve a live company problem that could be used without them. If the exercise would create usable campaign copy, a production-ready plan, or a detailed strategy for your current business, redesign it around fictionalized or historical material.

Candidate burden is part of assessment design, not an afterthought. Tell candidates the expected duration, format, tools allowed, whether preparation is expected, who will review the work, and how it will affect the decision. The CIPD advises employers to explain the assessment process in advance and avoid making it unnecessarily long; its selection-methods guidance also notes that skill-based tasks should resemble the job as closely as practical.

For a senior role, a live discussion of a brief may be better than a lengthy take-home assignment. Give all finalists the same one-page scenario, allow quiet reading time, and ask them to explain their choices. This lets the panel observe reasoning while reducing the chance that hours of unseen preparation, outside help, or familiarity with a particular presentation style decides the result.

Score independently before discussion. If three interviewers watch a live exercise, each should record observations and rate the work before anyone says, “I liked their approach.” The debrief can then focus on differences in evidence: Did one reviewer give credit for a point another missed? Did the rubric overvalue polish? Is a low score about an unstated expectation rather than the criterion itself?

Keep the criteria close to the work. For the operations exercise, four might be enough: identifies the decision, distinguishes urgent from important, makes assumptions visible, and writes a clear next step. “Executive presence,” “energy,” or “fit” do not belong on the sheet unless the team has translated them into observable, job-relevant behaviors.

If a panel cannot state how it will score an exercise before candidates receive it, the exercise is not ready to use.

Decide what an exercise cannot tell you

A good work sample creates evidence. It does not create certainty. A candidate may have a strong approach but make a minor factual error because the prompt was ambiguous. Another may produce an elegant answer by choosing an assumption the real role would not allow. The panel’s job is to interpret the output against the brief, not treat it as a miniature probation period.

It also cannot answer every hiring question. A written exercise may show that someone can form a recommendation. It may not show how they respond when a stakeholder rejects it, how they build trust over time, or whether they can learn a specialized internal process. Do not overread the method just because it feels tangible.

Selection procedures should be tied to the job and the purpose for which they are used. The EEOC’s guidance on employment tests and selection procedures emphasizes job-related assessment and flags the importance of considering whether an equally effective alternative could have less adverse impact. That is a reason to remove decorative tasks, unclear time limits, and criteria unrelated to the work—not a reason to retreat to unstructured conversation.

The next time a panel says, “Let’s give them a case study,” pause for five minutes before anyone writes the prompt. Ask one question: Which recurring decision will this exercise let us evaluate that our structured interview cannot? If the team cannot answer in one sentence, keep the process lighter and improve the interview instead.