Hacker News Reader

Comment by teen | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure they did the same thing for their marketing manager position. You are expected to come up with 2-3 marketing campaigns, and make a deck for them. Then they use the ideas regardless if you're hired.

View on HN

They did do this for a marketing manager position that a coworker ended up taking. I can confirm, because she had me proofread everything.

Unfortunately it's hard to separate this from legitimate requests for work sample based interviewing tasks.

If you send them something of economic value, there is no way to prove that it was thrown away. There is also no reason to throw it away - they should just pay you.

If you work for free, you are... working for free.

Sure there is. If they ask you to do something that they would legitimately ask an employee to do, there's a good chance they're looking to get some free work (or maybe the interview is genuine but they want to get free work out of the people they decline). As an employer, if you're trying to come up with a good work sample to request, you need to request something that's obviously not "real" work. In the case of the marketing manager, you could ask for 2-3 ad campaigns, but have them be campaigns for an obviously fake brand (ideally one in a different line of work entirely).

I request work samples from applicants with the same brief that would be given to a task currently facing our internal team. It makes it easy to compare candidates not only to each other but to our internal team. As our internal team has the project fresh in their mind they're aware of the requirements, scope, and limitations of the project. It makes them better able to judge the candidate's work.

Of course we pay them for this work at a predefined rate.

If you pay your candidates, then by all means ask whatever real question you want.

Yea, this is what I recommended to my coworker who ended up taking the marketing manager job. Ask to be paid for the work in exchange for Uber receiving exclusive use of it. Not sure if she ended up asking for it though. They still save money on this, and they should be well aware of the benefits of non-employees performing work.

Record your interviews and rain down a shitstorm on anyone who tries to pull this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com