A free trial of offshore staff in Australia tests about half a per cent of the decision you are making. My Cloud Assistant, the only Australian provider advertising one, offers a "5 hours (Part-time) or 10 hours (Full-time) trial period" on its virtual assistant page. Measured against its own published rates, that is roughly $108 of work. The audition was never where your risk lived.
Which is awkward, because asking for a trial is the first thing most founders do.
August added 46,000 jobs nobody committed to
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the August labour force figures this morning. Unemployment rose to 4.6 per cent, up 0.2 percentage points. Employment grew by 39,000. Underneath that headline, part-time employment rose by 46,000 and full-time employment fell by 6,000.
Sean Crick, the ABS head of labour statistics, put the two halves side by side: "This month there was 39,000 more people in employment, and 28,000 more people in unemployment."
So the country added work and declined to commit to it. If you want the honest version of what commitment costs, Outstaffer publishes every fee it charges rather than quoting on request.
What a free trial of offshore staff in Australia actually buys
My Cloud Assistant publishes "From $1950mthly" for a full-time 180 hour month. That is $10.83 an hour, so the ten hour trial is $108 of work against a $23,400 year. Half a per cent.
Ten hours at eight hours a day is a day and a quarter. You are deciding a $23,400 commitment on someone's first week, which is the week they know least about your business.
So what does the trial actually prove?
That the person turns up and can use a keyboard. Real failure arrives in month three, when the work turns ambiguous and nobody wrote anything down. No audition reaches month three.
Virtual Coworker offers no trial at all. It publishes $11 an hour for a bookkeeper as an "Inclusive Hourly Rate, No Extra Fees", staff working "20 to 40 Hours Dedicated Per Week, Ongoing". At 40 hours that is $22,880 a year: the same exposure, no audition. Two providers, one risk, and only one of them makes a feature of it.
The hidden costs sit in the exit, not the audition
Ask what happens in month seven instead. Who gives notice, how long is it, and whose employee is the person. My Cloud Assistant's own answer is "No long term contracts", which does more work for you than the trial ever will.
Outstaffer's published Employer of Record fee is $250 per employee per month, $3,000 a year, and the person is employed rather than supplied. The exit is an employment exit with defined notice, not a negotiation with a supplier who holds the relationship. Nobody advertises that line.
What should you ask for instead of a trial?
A written replacement term, a notice period in days, and who carries the wage cost while a replacement is found. Three questions, answerable in an email.
The strongest case for taking the trial anyway
A provider willing to put ten hours on the table before invoicing is saying something real about its own confidence. A trial also catches the genuinely wrong hire, the one who misread the role entirely, and catching that in week one beats $108. None of the arithmetic says the trial is a trick.
It says the trial is small. Take it if it is offered, and do not let it answer the questions about the exit, because what a head actually costs once the on-costs are counted dwarfs it. The same holds for the arithmetic on hiring the person yourself, where the fee you avoid is the smallest number on the page.
Related reading
- What an employee hired abroad costs, line by line
- The fee you can see is the only one you can argue with
Where I land on this
August showed hedging at national scale: add the hours, refuse the commitment. A trial is that instinct shrunk to a day and a quarter, and it buys a day and a quarter of certainty.
Price the exit first and the audition second. You can sign up and run a role through it and see what the committed version reads like on paper.
So here is the question I would put back to you. If the trial told you nothing either way, would you still make the hire?
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