I think it depends a lot on supply and demand dynamics for the specific role. If the company is having a hard time finding someone qualified and they see you as a good fit, they definitely might prefer to get someone working part time immediately compared to waiting who knows how long for another good candidate. This especially applies to startups under time pressure.
And then once you get in the door and show you’re a net positive, why not keep you? 15 hours per week of net positive is better than 0, even if they’d really prefer 40+.
I've been on the managing side of part-time employees. We did part time when people were going back for advanced degrees or had other short-term needs away from work, but still wanted to keep their jobs.
Unfortunately it's really hard to have one person working 10-15 hours per week while everyone else is working 40.
You encounter a lot of situations where teams are delaying meetings until the part-time person is available. You have to catch the part-time person up on things that have changed while they were away. If the part-time person doesn't finish an important task before their 10-15 hours is up, someone else might have to take it and restart the task to remove it as a blocker.
It only really works when the part-time person's project is really independent and not time sensitive. Anything that interacts with the rest of the team or the rest of the company comes with additional overhead that might come close to cancelling out the productivity of having one person working 10 hours per week.
There's a lot of wishful thinking about part time work where all hours worked contribute equally to the project, but in the real world having 4 full-time employees and 1 part-time person working 10 hours on a project is basically the same as having just 4 full-time employees working on the same thing. Having only 4 full-time employees might even be more efficient due to the lower communication overhead.
So that leaves independent projects and work that isn't time sensitive.
Yeah, these are definitely valid points. But is it so bad that you don’t hire someone great who comes along and only wants part time when you’ve got no other decent candidates in the pipeline?
The challenges you mention are real, but many companies will still be tempted even if they have to make an effort to carve out specific tasks that are a good fit.
> But is it so bad that you don’t hire someone great who comes along and only wants part time when you’ve got no other decent candidates in the pipeline?
Sorry to tell you this, but this is correct.
If I hire someone part-time while I search for another person then I have to fire the part-time person when I find a full-time person.
Then I have to do all the work of on-boarding two people, the work of transitioning work from one person to another and the struggle of turning the position over. If I have the part-time person onboard for 4 months and they're working 10 hours per week, I'm only getting the equivalent of maybe 1 month of extra productivity. That 1 month of productivity is probably offset by all of the overhead and transition time.
I know it's not what you wanted to hear, but it's how things go.
If someone is only available part-time, we reserve isolated project-level work for them on an as-needed basis. Hiring someone to be part-time for a temporary time is so much overhead and work for someone who's barely working 1-2 days per week.
And then once you get in the door and show you’re a net positive, why not keep you? 15 hours per week of net positive is better than 0, even if they’d really prefer 40+.