Work Trial AI is fixing the broken job market

“The hiring process is completely broken for both candidates and companies.”

Kelly An is the Chief of Staff at Final Round AI, serving as Product & GTM Lead for their newest product, Work Trial AI. An expert in the recruiting tech/AI fields, she paints a vivid—and bleak—picture of what today’s job market looks like:

• Unemployment rate is very high: Lots of people are looking for jobs, some are struggling
• Resumes are perfect: Because of AI, all resumes are standardized, perfect, and tailored to the job
• Interviews haven’t changed: The same process—several rounds, take-home assignment, behavioral—is still in place today despite the shift
• People have a hard time standing out: The current state makes it challenging for good-fit candidates to make an impression

“I think about 90% of companies still follow the same interview process,” she continues. “There are multiple rounds of interviews at different levels. Eventually, a candidate is given a take-home assignment—which is great, but it doesn’t show how the candidate arrived at completion, or the steps they took to get there, or even how long it took.”

“This process doesn’t give a good analysis into how good a candidate will be as an actual employee because there are so many different factors that ultimately determine fit,” she concludes.

Work Trial AI plans to change this.

The team’s bold bets

You’ve probably seen their viral Twitter/X ads. And if you live in San Francisco, you’ve certainly seen their billboards around, featuring Faux celebrities like Yi Long Ma and Fake Justin Bieber advertising the risks of hiring imposters.

“Even with the video we published on X, the ad was racy, and didn’t show the product in a literal sense. Instead it was a metaphor meant to illustrate what it means to hire someone based on talent, and not from surface level signals like a resume or interviews. Most product videos have a guy sitting down reading a script, with product screenshots in the background. What Work Trial AI did was a bold bet,” says Kelly.

“Those bold bets are why I wanted to join Work Trial AI in the first place. There was a lot of synergy between me and the team before I started. I shared the company’s vision, saw the potential, and knew I wanted to contribute.”

Work Trial AI’s biggest bet of all? The hiring landscape is long overdue for a disruption.

Making a difference with AI

Kelly explains that Work Trial AI is a tool with double benefit—improving the experience for both companies (hirers) and candidates. She outlines two major value adds.

For candidates

“There are a lot of tools you might use to do your job. For instance, developers are often in GitHub, marketers might be working out of Notion and the CMS. Work Trial AI watches which tools you use—and how you work—in order to give real productivity recommendations.”

Work Trial AI currently boasts many integrations with platforms that candidates use to complete work, like Slack, Notion, GitHub, Google, Figma, and more.

The benefits go on: “The other aspect is that it surfaces the actual work you’re doing, so if you delivered X output, but had to do Y and Z to get there, Work Trial AI helps ensure this impactful work is visible, even if it’s not expressed in your output.”

“It’s a big commitment to join a company,” she concludes. “Not only are they vetting you, but you’re also vetting them for things like culture fit, clear directions, and more. In general, work trials are a great way to get signal into those things that have previously been opaque.”

For companies

“If you’re a company looking to hire someone, you’re facing a ton of challenges right now,” explains Kelly. “For one, it has already been difficult to find good talent. Now, with the prevalence of AI, it’s even more difficult to find AI native talent—especially just from parsing a resume.”

Work Trial AI helps companies get a real glimpse into the criteria that matter for candidates:

• Do they truly have the skills listed on their resumes?
• Is there a culture fit between company and candidate?
• Do they work well with teams?
• Can they adapt to shifting priorities?

Her vision is an optimistic one: “Final Round AI already helped candidates become more confident, and apply for roles they’re likely to succeed in. Now, with Work Trial AI, the interview process is also changing to accommodate this new paradigm.”

To date, over 10,000 work trials have been creatied with Work Trial AI—all with a single click.

Proof of concept

“One of the biggest things about Work Trial AI is that it helps candidates demonstrate their skills, so that they aren’t limited to a short interview window to try to say the right things.”

To illustrate her point, she flipped this on me, asking “How would you market yourself if you were interviewing for a job?” Suddenly, I was on the spot.

My answer was that I would probably talk about broad categories, allowing the interviewer to drill down into a category for more details, but this didn’t feel optimal.

“You can spend an entire interview describing one very specific thing, maybe one or two specific disciplines. Would you feel like your interviewer got a good representation of you and your skills if that were the case?”

No, I wouldn’t.

And in that moment I begun to wholly share her optimism for a future with better interviews, better candidate experiences, better matchmaking, and a chance for me to show, not tell.

Hope for the future

With the launch of Work Trial AI just under a month ago, the team is already seeing big wins from local customers like Linear, PostHog, and Automatic, and audits for SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA are already underway. The candidate reviews on their site speak for themselves, with users starting as an experiment and ending up with full time jobs.

Kelly is more optimistic about the future than ever.

“From Final Round AI, we learned that there is a big appetite for mock interviews with real-time video. And in Work Trial AI, we already have a mix of real and AI teammates built into the experience. I think there’s some synergy there.”

She pauses, not wanting to make promises or reveal secrets.

“Check back with us soon. We’re always innovating and focusing on delivering value, and I know there’s something special here.”

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