Using Trial Projects to Evaluate Operations Candidates

Operations roles are hard to evaluate from a resume because the work itself is judgment under constraint, not a list of credentials. A trial project closes that gap, but only if it is scoped, staffed, and paid the right way. This piece walks through how.

Why resumes fall short for operations roles specifically

An operations manager's actual job is rarely visible in bullet points. The role requires learning from past work to build more efficient processes, keeping records clean enough that other departments can rely on them, forecasting what will change and planning for it, communicating across groups of people with different priorities, and running multi-step processes without losing track of the details. A resume line doesn't capture any of that. A job title tells you almost nothing about whether someone can do these things well.

What actually separates strong operations candidates from weak ones is outcomes: measurable gains in efficiency, costs that came down under their watch, teams they moved through a hard transition, bottlenecks they found and cleared. Years of experience and a polished title say little about whether any of that happened.

Resumes have become a weaker signal for screening candidates in recent years. Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Rising Team, has called the current job market "the largest upheaval in modern history," and the reason is straightforward: AI makes it trivially easy to apply to roles at scale, and hiring managers are now buried under volumes of applications that are harder to tell apart. There are simply more applications to read. A well-crafted, AI-assisted resume can look almost identical to one built from years of real, hard-won experience, so the resume stops working as a filter at the exact moment it needs to work hardest.

That matters more in 2026 than it did a few years ago because the cost of a bad hire has gone up. SHRM's 2026 hiring outlook describes a hiring environment where every approved role is treated as business-critical, approval cycles stretch longer, and scrutiny at the offer stage is tighter than it has been. A mis-hire in that environment doesn't just cost a bad quarter. It costs a role that took months to get approved.

Work sample tests as predictors of ops performance

A trial project works because it puts a candidate inside something close to the actual job and lets the hiring team watch what happens, rather than asking them to guess from a conversation or a document. An interview depends heavily on how well someone talks about their work, and a resume depends on how well someone writes it up after the fact. A work sample removes both of those layers and replaces them with direct behavior under conditions that resemble day-one demands.

The research backs this up with real numbers. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Assessment Decision Guide puts the predictive validity of work sample tests at.54 and cognitive ability tests at.51. For operations roles specifically, that combination lines up well with what the job actually asks of someone: a structured assessment tests analytical thinking and process design, while a trial project tests execution and judgment under real constraints. Together, the two methods cover far more of the job than either one alone.

This isn't a passing trend. A 2025 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that nearly two-thirds of employers now use skill-based hiring for entry-level roles. Operations hiring is simply catching up to where the rest of hiring is already headed.

What makes a trial project especially well-suited to operations is the kind of traits it reveals without anyone having to ask for them directly. Clevry's 2025 Hiring Intelligence Report, drawing on 2.1 million candidates, found that employers most want to assess listening, resilience, stress management, calm, and adaptability in 2026. An interview can only ask a candidate to describe these qualities in the abstract. A well-designed trial project surfaces them on its own, because the candidate has to actually listen to a stakeholder's constraints, stay calm under a deadline, and adapt a plan when new information shows up mid-task. The traits employers care about most are exactly the ones an interview is worst-equipped to measure and a trial project is best-equipped to show.

Where in the hiring process a trial project belongs

Where a trial project sits in the funnel changes what it's for. Using it early in front of every applicant turns it into a burden candidates resent. At volume, it becomes a cost employers can't sustain. Put at the end, after interviews have already built a picture of who someone is, it confirms what the process already found rather than trying to generate that picture from scratch.

The practitioner consensus is that a trial project belongs with candidates the team would likely have hired anyway, based on interviews alone. Its job is to confirm what interviews already suggested or break a tie between two strong finalists, not to generate early signal about who's worth talking to at all. Interviews still do things a deliverable can't: they reveal how someone thinks through system design out loud, how they communicate under pressure, whether they fit the team's culture, and how they manage stakeholders who disagree with them. In operations, where cross-functional judgment matters as much as raw process execution, skipping straight to a deliverable and ignoring the conversation misses real parts of the job.

Linear's hiring model shows this late-funnel placement in practice. The trial comes after the hiring team has already formed a strong view of the candidate, and the project itself is built around what the team is actually working on right now. It functions as a simulation of real work for someone the team already believes in.

For operations roles, that suggests a clear order: structured assessment and interviews first, to build a shortlist the team can stand behind; a trial project for that shortlist, once trust is already established; and references as the final check before an offer. Each stage tests something the one before it couldn't, so running them out of order wastes the trial project's real value as confirmation.

Scoping the Right Task for an Ops Trial Project

The right prompt for a trial project comes from the team's actual current work, cut down to a size a candidate can realistically finish inside a time window that's been disclosed in advance. Anything invented purely for the purpose of testing candidates tends to lack the mess and tradeoffs of a real operational problem, and candidates can often tell the difference.

Linear's approach to designing a prompt starts with a small supporting team, made up of the recruiter, the hiring manager, and three to five teammates who would work closely with the eventual hire. That team first agrees on what a strong output would actually look like, based on what the team is prioritizing right now, and only then works backward to design a task that fits inside a limited scope while staying close to real work. The order matters: define success first, then build the prompt to produce evidence of it, rather than inventing a task and hoping it reveals something useful.

For operations roles, "real" work means tasks that test process thinking, prioritization when resources or time are tight, communication across departments, or structured execution of a multi-step plan. That could look like a process audit of an existing workflow, a draft communication plan for a cross-functional rollout, a prioritization framework for competing requests, or a rough draft of a new workflow. None of these need to produce a finished product. What they need to produce is evidence of how a candidate approaches a real constraint, which is a much lower bar to scope than a complete deliverable.

Scope has to be bounded and disclosed before the candidate agrees to anything. Candidates need to know upfront how much time the task is expected to take, because unclear expectations here are where trust between candidate and employer starts to break down.

The Oaktree Initiative offers a concrete version of what bounded and serious can look like together: a trial scoped to a defined number of hours, paid at a defined hourly rate, with full-time work available immediately for the candidate who performs well. That structure proves that a task can stay real and operationally complex without becoming an open-ended, unpaid obligation.

What to avoid is just as clear. A prompt that's too abstract rewards polish and writing ability over actual judgment. A prompt that's too large asks for a week of unpaid labor disguised as an assessment. A prompt recycled across every candidate without being tied to the team's actual priorities is a generic test that could have been given anywhere, not a simulation of real work.

Designing and Running the Trial: Who Should Be Involved

A trial project judged by a single hiring manager is one person's impression dressed up as an assessment. A trial project designed and judged by the future team, against criteria they agreed on in advance, is an actual structured method.

Linear's model distributes this work across a small group: the recruiter, the hiring manager, and three to five teammates who would work closely with the person in the role. Spreading the design and evaluation across several people catches blind spots that a single reviewer would likely miss, whether that's a bias toward a particular communication style or a narrow idea of what "good" looks like.

The team needs to agree on what a strong output looks like before anyone sees a candidate's submission. That agreement functions as the ops equivalent of a grading rubric, and it's the thing that keeps the comparison across candidates fair rather than dependent on whoever happens to read the project last.

The people best positioned to judge the work are the teammates who will actually collaborate with this hire day to day, not senior leaders sitting further from the daily details of the role. Someone who will be in the weeds with this person each week has a sharper read on whether the output reflects real operational judgment than someone several layers removed.

The recruiter's role goes beyond scheduling. Someone who has already spoken with the candidate at length is in a position to flag whether a submission matches the way the candidate has actually communicated throughout the process, or whether it reads like a one-time polished performance built for the occasion.

Whoever sits on the evaluation panel needs to score against the criteria the team set in advance, not free-form gut reactions. Skipping the rubric at the evaluation stage brings back the subjectivity the trial project was supposed to remove.

Compensation and legal exposure from scope creep

The risk with trial projects isn't hypothetical, and it isn't only an ethical one. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, anyone doing real work that benefits an employer has to be paid at least minimum wage, even if that work happens during what's labeled a trial, and the U.S. Department of Labor has already taken enforcement action against companies that tried to dress up unpaid labor as a "working interview".

Scope creep is usually how this starts. A short, bounded assessment turns into "can you stay another hour to finish this," or "can you come back tomorrow and take another look." At that point the candidate is doing unpaid work, and that's where legal exposure and candidate resentment both begin.

Metaintro CEO Lacey Kaelani offers a workable threshold: if pre-interview work runs past two to three hours, or produces something the company could actually use for revenue, the candidate should be paid for it. That's a clean enough rule that most hiring teams can apply it without much interpretation.

There's an equity cost to getting this wrong, too. Unpaid trials fall hardest on candidates who are already employed and can't take time off speculatively, and on candidates with caregiving responsibilities that leave them little slack. Those are often the most experienced operations candidates a team could hire, not the least.

Regulators are paying closer attention to this as well. The UK government has opened a formal call for evidence on unpaid internships and work trials. The direction of travel is toward more scrutiny, not less, and toward legislative attention rather than only case-by-case enforcement.

None of this is a reason to avoid trial projects. It's a reason to pay for them, bound them clearly, and disclose the expected time commitment before a candidate agrees to anything, the same approach Linear and the Oaktree Initiative both already take.

How to evaluate the output fairly and consistently

The whole purpose of a trial project is undermined if the team evaluates it as a finished-work competition rather than a window into how a candidate thinks. A deliverable is evidence of process, and judging it well means paying as much attention to the reasoning behind it as to the output itself.

In operations specifically, the signals that matter most are how the candidate prioritized competing demands inside a limited scope, which assumptions they stated outright, where they flagged real uncertainty instead of guessing, and where they made a confident call instead. None of that is about whether their final answer matches what the team itself would have produced.

A rubric built from the success criteria the team agreed on before the project started is what keeps the comparison across candidates fair, and it limits how much a candidate's polish or presentation style can distort the read.

A debrief conversation, where the candidate walks the team through their own deliverable, often reveals more than the document does on its own. It also mirrors something close to real operations work, where someone regularly has to explain and defend a plan to stakeholders who weren't in the room when it was built.

A specific trap is asking only "would we use this exact output?" when a candidate who identified the right problem and named the real constraints clearly may be worth more to the team than one who produced a cleaner answer to a question that was slightly off. Operations judgment is visible in how someone frames a problem more than in how neatly they resolve it.

The team should score the submission against the rubric before the debrief conversation happens, so that conversation adds new information instead of quietly rewriting the team's first impression.

And the evaluation should go back to the candidate, win or lose. Telling someone what the team saw and how they scored it is the least a paid, bounded trial owes the person who did the work, and it reflects the same clear, direct communication a team should expect from a strong operations hire.