[vhab]

> If hiring a freelancer to do a little thing tends to generate all sorts of nightmarish legal liabilities, your company is either a government contractor or it has even bigger structural problems than hiring.

It might not be an issue for your company, but your candidate might have a non-compete (or other clause) preventing them from accepting compensation or even performing work for another company at all.

Things get trickier as soon as money is involved.

[bjt]

Any company trying to enforce such a non-compete against someone who just earned $200 would spend a lot more than that in legal fees. This feels like legal paranoia to me.

[m_mueller]

Furthermore, in German we have a saying: "Where there is no judge, there's no executioner". Maybe this attitude is more popular in Switzerland than in Germany, but the basic meaning is: don't sweat the legality of small exchanges that (a) don't affect anyone negatively and (b) aren't in some government agency's crosshair. That being said, your mileage in different legal systems may vary - in our civil law system it's probably more common for a judge to simply throw out such trifling matters and people are generally also way less inclined to start a lawsuit.

[blowski]

To me it feels like classic "A-ha! I discovered an edge case so the entire solution is invalid!". Just handle the edge case differently to how you handle everything else.

[walshemj]

HR don't care they can afford the cost where as an individual employee is unlikely to be able.

[marcosdumay]

Then the candidate says something like "Well, you know, I can't take any payment before I'm out of this job. Can't I just do it for "free", and payment come as a bonus on hiring?"

[jkchu]

What if you don't get an offer or if you decline their offer?

[st3v3r]

I wouldn't do that. But then, I don't work for free.