Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
Are trial work weeks a good idea?
If a company offered you a paid one-week trial instead of using a traditional interview process, would you do it?
Nobody really trusts anybody or anything anymore, at least not in the hiring process, replete as it is with AI slop résumés, live AI interview tools and plain old lying; if nothing else, the AI era is giving people a lot of cover.
So, it is probably unsurprising in the grand scheme that companies, especially those in tech and white-collar sectors, are turning to ever more intensive trial shifts, in what one writer calls the “show your work era of job hunting.”
“AI lets everyone talk,” wrote Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover. “Your next boss wants to be sure you can walk.”
She likens it to the way college professors have increasingly asked students to show more of their work and do more exams in person. “Hiring managers are looking for workers who can back up what they say they know. The job interview has always been a sort of audition; now companies are increasingly looking for people who can get on the proverbial stage and perform.”
Not that the idea is all that new, mind you — some workplaces have been believers in the trial shift model for a while, although today’s companies are taking it further, with trial shifts that stretch as long as a whole week.
“People are often surprised when they hear about a trial week, but to us it makes a lot of sense,” wrote David Rusenko Jr., founder of Weebly. “It’s hard to tell from a few hours of conversation what someone is really like, or how good she is at her job. And it’s hard for a candidate to tell what it’s really like to work with us.”
Rusenko added that very few applicants opt out of the trial week, and that around two thirds of the time, the applicant ends up getting hired. “
The trial work week has some pitfalls, naturally. Companies that try to view it as a very short, unpaid internship or a cheap way to get some extra help might find it less well received, although one employer who uses the trial week, Moe Hutt, told Business Insider that “companies are able to do this right now because it is an employer’s market.” When that inevitably changes, getting candidates to sit for a week-long tryout will probably be a bit harder.
But Rusenko suggests it works better when you throw money at it. “We want to make it worth their time,” he said. “We fly them out, put them up in a hotel and pay them for the week. I tell people that the worst-case scenario is that they use a week of vacation, but because of the extra pay they can take a nicer vacation later on.”
The price of work, visible for all
LLMs are becoming increasingly proficient at providing salary information, offering a new, accessible tool for compensation benchmarking and negotiation
Last summer, we wrote in this newsletter about a report from Payscale suggesting LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) were contributing to what the report’s authors called a “widening disconnect” around salary expectations.
LLMs, they suggested, were chronically overestimating market salaries, and as we put it back then, “quietly pushing the 20 per cent or so of jobseekers who use tools like Gemini or ChatGPT to research salaries to unknowingly drive up their salary expectations.”
A new report from OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) released last month gave us another look at this trend, and suggested not only that workers are increasing their reliance on LLMs to research salary and wage information (sending as many as three million messages per day about it), but that the tools themselves are actually getting much more accurate at the task of determining pay benchmarks.
“AI is a new type of labour-market intermediary,” reads the OpenAI report, titled ‘ChatGPT and the Price of Work’. “Rather than requiring a worker to search across multiple websites, interpret scattered salary pages or ask a socially costly question, a model can synthesize wage information and return a benchmark in seconds. ChatGPT is already being used in this way.”
And, according to OpenAI at least, workers are getting much better answers now than they were a year ago. In a benchmarking test, it claims ChatGPT was able to accurately provide market wage information to within 10 per cent of the actual average, 99.8 per cent of the time. “These results imply that ChatGPT can serve as a reliable national wage look-up layer for workers,” OpenAI concluded.
HR professionals say this is likely the new normal. “Gone are the days where it was a song and dance at the end of the interview process to see what you might get,” says Louisa Benedicto, vice-president of HR recruiting at Hays, speaking to HR Reporter. “It will become a more demanding task for managers, who will be required to have a rationale, have an explanation, have a basis for determining salary and compensation.”
It’s still very early in this transition, but the evidence suggests that for all the complaints people have about AI’s role in the jobseeking process, it is at least helping to smooth over salary negotiations. A study this month from Eastern Washington University found that 78 per cent of professionals felt more confident about salary negotiations, and 63 per cent felt their use of an LLM to prepare actually got them a better deal.
Some HR professionals think it could lead to a more transparent culture around pay, which would benefit everyone. “Employers who are less transparent would find themselves more vulnerably, in that the employee could be armed with all this data,” said Anil Verma of the University of Toronto. “I think employers should be fully aware of what information is available through AI, and to be prepared.”
The hell of corporate retreats
Sure, team retreats can help create a more collaborative workforce. But they can also go off the rails fast
If you’re anything like me (which is to say, you have a professional interest in workplace culture writ large, and a personal interest in television), then the new series from the makers of last year’s hit show Jury Duty was always going to be appointment viewing. (For the uninitiated, the show’s premise was to take a single unsuspecting non-actor and surround them with actors in a simulated tour of jury duty, only revealing the orchestration at the end.)
This year, with Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the Amazon-created show swapped the fake jury room for a fake, and very outlandish, corporate retreat for a fake business, a hot sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s. We’ll leave the TV viewing to you, but for anyone who’s ever been on a corporate retreat, the show is definitely worth a watch.
Everything in the show is fairly outlandish, sometimes straining credulity — although, it appears the writers and producers didn’t have to stretch too far. The interest in the show prompted the Wall Street Journal to unearth a story about just how wrong a corporate retreat can actually go. In 2017, the tech company Plex hosted Plexcon 2017 — a $500,000, Survivor-themed company retreat where anything that could go wrong did, according to company execs.
The company founder, Scott Olechowski, and its CEO, Keith Valory, told WSJ the trip started with E. coli sickness for Valory, which caused him to lose “eight or 10 pounds.” It got worse from there. One of the first challenges was a Survivor classic — eat something gross. “When I opened up the cover, it was a dead tarantula,” Plex’s head of business development, Shawn Eldridge, recalled. “I just grabbed it and did it. Pretty horrible, not going to lie.”
Then came the drill sergeant Plex had hired, which Valory said was “one of our biggest mistakes,” He had staff doing Army crawls on the beach in 100-degree weather. “It’s hot and humid and people are passing out,” Olechowski recalls. “I don’t think he’d ever seen quite such an unfit group.” Worse still, said one senior product manager, is the were crawling on top of a fire ant nest. (The whole thing was caught on tape — you can actually watch the promotional video for the event, although much of the calamity has been scrubbed clean.)
So, next time you’re forced to endure a corporate cooking class or escape room session, just remember it could be much worse. Although, as bad as Plex story seems, those interviewed about seem to remember it fondly. “You get really close bonds on these trips; it’s like the life-sustaining force of the company,” said E. coli-stricken Valory. Heck, even the fire ants weren’t enough to ruin the memory for the senior product manager, who said it was “still one of the most fun trips ever.”
Anthropic is making AI boom again
At a time when the benefits of AI in the workplace are still being determined, the company behind Claude is making big strides with business customers
According to multiple data sets, it appears as if the rate of AI adoption in North American workplaces has been increasing again in the early months of 2026, after a few months last year where the data indicated a plateauing adoption rate.
According to the Ramp AI index, adoption rates at small- and medium-sized firms is now tipping into majority territory: among small businesses, 42 per cent now pay for an AI subscription, while 52 per cent of medium-sized organizations do the same.
What’s behind this new drive to the tools? In part, it’s because businesses are loving Anthropic’s Claude tool, which is now the AI of choice for most new adopters, capturing 73 per cent of new spending on AI in February 2026, according to Ramp’s data.
The data is revealing of what’s going on in the AI industry, which has increased its focus on business and business-adjacent services recently.
“The AI race is shifting from who has the best model to who can monetize the fastest — and Anthropic is pulling ahead with the customers that matter most: enterprises,” reports Axios. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, was for a long time something like the default choice when a company was adopting AI tools. But that no longer appears to be the case; nowadays, Claude rules the roost.
Analysts and industry experts argue that while OpenAI has done a lot to appear as the cutting-edge AI technology, businesses are looking for something of a safe haven; Anthropic now says it has around a third of the enterprise market.
“For enterprise customers, safety is a persuasive selling point,” wrote Jeremy Kahn at Fortune. “Many feel that it is harder for users to push Claude to jump its guardrails and produce problematic outputs, whether that’s giving someone instructions for making a bioweapon, revealing company secrets or spewing hate speech. Whatever their motives, business customers are eagerly signing up.”
And that fact seems to be pushing the whole AI industry to shift its focus to its enterprise clients. In late March, OpenAI jettisoned its video-generation app, Sora, and has been moving away from consumer-focused use cases in favour of business-focused ones ahead of a planned IPO later this year. You can likely expect this dynamic to drive the industry moving forward, as AI companies start to care less about generating your cupcake recipes and more about being the service your boss wants you to use.
“Anthropic’s enterprise dominance wasn’t inevitable,” writes Louis Columbus at Venture Beat. “Two years ago, OpenAi held 50 per cent market share to Anthropic’s 12 per cent. The reversal happened because safety-first development produced the operational characteristics enterprises need.”
