It's amazing that you'd go through all sorts of hand-wringing to supposedly eliminate (or at least claim to feel bad about) bias, and then put people through a mandatory process to basically go back to square one. You're implicitly excluding mid career employees with actual obligations, single mothers, people with obligations outside of work, and people who work for companies with contracts that assert copyright for work performed outside of work.
If anyone asked me to do an "audition" contract job on nights and weekends, screwing up my family life and my professional job that I'm still obliged to perform, I would laugh heartily before hanging up. Even in a unemployment situation, I'd get stuck with a more complicated tax return, and be faced with a future of similarly douchey behaviors to follow.
Just how enforceable are those "we own everything you do on your time off" contract clauses? I've seen those in a lot of tech jobs and they seem like textbook overreach to my non-lawyer eyes.
Are there any cases of people working on some open source project on nights/weekends and have their employer swoop in later and claim copyright because of their employment contract? Has it ever stood up to legal scrutiny?
Whatever happened to just hiring someone on a contingency basis? Sure it will cost more if the person ends up being a bad fit since you'll be paying unemployment and they'll be out of a job entirely, but it's far more schedule friendly and less sketchy than this "pretend to be a moonlighting contractor" bit.
If anyone asked me to do an "audition" contract job on nights and weekends, screwing up my family life and my professional job that I'm still obliged to perform, I would laugh heartily before hanging up. Even in a unemployment situation, I'd get stuck with a more complicated tax return, and be faced with a future of similarly douchey behaviors to follow.