Most hiring processes are very good at one thing: filtering out the wrong people. Screen, panel interview, references. Done well, that sequence removes the obvious mismatches. What it does not do is tell you how a specific person will behave in a specific role at your company, on a difficult week, with real stakes.
For senior roles, that is the only question that matters. So at Livit, once we are down to two or three finalists, we stop interviewing them and start working with them.
We call the whole process Immersive Hiring, and this specific step “Work-With-Us Days”. Companies like Buffer and Linear have recently made paid work trials fashionable again. We have been running ours for years, and I am confident they have saved us upwards of $50,000 in the last couple of years alone, plus months of onboarding and then exiting the wrong hires. This is how they work.
What Work-With-Us Days look like
The format is simple. A finalist spends one to two full working days inside Livit, paid, under a short consulting agreement (plus NDA), scheduled weeks in advance. They get access to Slack and all other critical internal tools, and a schedule that looks a lot like a real first week: an intro to the company and tools, a workshop with me on our structure, services and current challenges, sessions with the leads of each team, lunch with the team, and a wrap-up at the end of each day to discuss the work. Some schedules included optional badminton or sunset networking drinks on the rooftop.
In between, they work on three to five assignments. This is where the format earns its keep, because the assignments are never invented for the occasion. They are real things we’ve dealt with that quarter, or whatever is on our desk that week.
For top hires, the two days are also designed to contain slightly too much. That is deliberate. Senior roles at Livit involve being pulled in several directions at once, with less time than the work deserves, and the job is to prioritize well, negotiate with the team, and still move things forward. We simulate that rather than describe it.
When we hired for our COO role, the finalists sat in on a live commercial negotiation that was not going our way, reviewed a client project so large it would have consumed the team’s full capacity if we said yes (with no clean answer either way), and read a severance policy proposal and gave an honest opinion on it, on the spot.
When we hired business development, the brief included a lead that had just come in: a 50-person company from Australia wanting to run a three-week hackathon out of our hub. Fifty desks for three weeks sits at, or slightly above, our capacity. They had questions about visas. They wanted marketing collateral produced, which is not a core Livit service. The candidate’s task was to make a commercial decision: take it or not, on what terms, at what price, after finding and consulting the four people in the building who could tell him what was feasible. He also ran a lunch conversation with a founder exploring Indonesian market entry, weighing a local entity against our Employer of Record service. His brief was to qualify, build trust and earn a next step, with closing explicitly off the table.
What we ask every finalist to deliver
By the end of day two, every finalist owes us the same things, regardless of role:
- Verdict and reasoning on all their role specific tasks
- A short SWOT of what they observed in 48 hours inside the company. Where we win, where we lose, what is being left on the table, what could undercut us.
- Two or three OKRs they would want to drive in their first quarter, specific and measurable, built on what they have just seen.
- Their own onboarding plan. How their first 30, 60 and 90 days should go if we hire them: what they need to learn, who they need to talk to, what they want to have tested by each milestone.
For commercial roles we add a fifth: propose your own targets and the commission structure you would find motivating, with the reasoning. We tell candidates directly that we are not looking for a number that flatters us or sandbags them. We are looking at how they think about accountability and incentive design.
The onboarding plan turns out to be the most telling assignment of all. Livit runs on the manager-of-one principle: people who set their own direction, organize their own work and do not need daily check-ins. Every candidate says they are a self-starter in an interview. Asked to design their own first ninety days, the ones who think in systems hand you a plan. The ones who are used to being managed wait to be told what to do.
What it shows you that interviews cannot
Two days with real assignments produce information no panel can. We have watched a finalist handle a live negotiation with more composure than most of the room. We have also had a finalist, stronger on paper than anyone else in the process, deliver three of five assignments to an immaculate standard and leave the other two untouched, because the first three were not yet finished to their satisfaction.
That is a serious answer to a question nobody asked. The job of a senior operator is getting to all five by Thursday, some of them at eighty percent, and knowing which ones. Perfection on three out of five looks brilliant in an interview and quietly strains an operation six months in. References would likely have called it a strength. Two days made it visible.
Why it is fair to candidates
Immersive hiring only works if it is transparent. The days are paid. They are scheduled in advance. Everyone the candidate meets, inside the company and across the table, knows what the two days are for. And the candidate gets as much out of it as we do: two days of seeing exactly what they would be walking into, the real problems, the real people, the real pace of the place. They are choosing us as much as we are choosing them, and the process admits it.
It is also the reason we can run a flat, self-managed company. Livit has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Asia and ranks among the most engaged teams globally on OfficeVibe. Structures like self-approved time off and distributed decision-making only hold if the people inside them were selected for how they operate, not for how well they interview.
The cost, and why we pay it
Two days of a busy team’s attention. A brief that takes real time to write properly. The mild discomfort of letting an outsider sit in your finance meeting and then tell you, with a straight face, what they think of your company after 48 hours. Not everything they say is flattering, and that is part of the value.
There is a payback, though, and it arrives on day one. The person who gets the job walks in half onboarded. They already know the tools, the team, the current problems and the arguments around them. They have met the clients, or a convincing version of them. They wrote their own 30-60-90 plan two weeks ago, and now they get to run it. Most new senior hires spend their first month finding out what the company is. Ours spend it doing the job.
A résumé tells you what someone has done. References tell you what they were like to work with somewhere else. Two days inside the company tell you what they will do when the ground moves. For a role that shapes culture and makes real calls under real pressure, that is the only information you did not already have.
If you are building a team in Indonesia or fully remotely and want help designing a hiring process that tests for the job rather than the interview, talk to us.
