its part of the recruitment process.
it all depends what you are asking them to do. if you ask them to come in and do a days work for nowt thats not OK
but on our unpaid work trials they are not asked or expected to do any work
whoever they are on with has a normal days work for, a single man day.
what we want is for the potential recruit to see the job properly, warts and all, and to see if they want to do it. this is really important for them if they are already employed elsewhere. it means they can be confident leaving their old work for this
and we want to see how they are with customers and how they are out of a formal interview. What they do when they aren't asked, and if my staff think they would be good to work with.
our staff get paid purely on a cut of the days work so its in their interest to have people with them who are going to graft
to be honest its unskilled manual work. other than their work history, i would say the our unpaid trial is more significant that the interview for this type of work.
each to their own though.