You don't know the name of the company, just refuse when a company asks you to do unpaid work for the interview.
I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
Most of us put effort into the skills on our resume. What's annoying is that no one on the other side apparently recognizes that and asks us to reprove our skills with things like this anyway.
>I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street
And there's not a better way to assert my argument than when a company treats a PhD the same as someone who just walked in off the street.
Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.
> Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else.
> someone who just walked in off the street.
Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
Some companies structure that better than others. Some feel like more of a time waste than others. But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems naive. It’s not a trial shift at a bar.
Absolutely none? I somehow doubt that, otherwise only the most incompetently run companies would still ask for that kind of commitment during the process and... Actually, you might have a point. I certainly have rarely liked work in companies that demanded free work from me during the hiring process. That might be one of the reasons why I haven't done an unpaid take home test in a long time.
> But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems
So the company isn't getting the candidate to work for free because it isn't getting value... If we ignore the value it gets from the interview process itself.
Providing some company a service so that it can make a decision on how it operates sounds like work to me.
On another note, this doesn't take into account that pointless busywork is still work.
It is work, it’s just not the cynical exploitation that’s being implied. The intent is that both employer and candidate mutually benefit from it. Evaluating the output of these assignments is also work given for your mutual benefit, and it’s typically seen by multiple people, which makes it a non-trivial amount. Both sides do speculative work for the evaluation stage, in that sense.
They can ask the applicant to do the work to prove themselves, with the pretence of an available job, and don't even have to consider the result of that work.
This scenario lays bare that the employer has all the power in the situation.
If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.
I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".
> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him
Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".
It’s a relatively recent thing to call out unpaid work on social media. The bar that runs entirely on trial shifts. The media giant running unpaid internships.
In those cases the work really is valuable to the business. You can do bar work or proofreading at close to the output of an experienced person right off the bat. So those are rightly called out when abused.
On the other hand, the idea that you’re gonna come to an established engineering or product team with novel and valuable new insights, after a random Saturday of you thinking about it, is patently silly.
Likewise, if companies are in desperate need for employees, they will behave differently than when they are swamped by job applications.
It is kind of "entitled" to be able to picky about jobs or applications, but people and companies probably got there by acquiring valuable skills or valuable market positions. I don't see what labeling it "entitled" adds to the issue.
I could say you sound "privileged" for being able to afford to spend so much time on your applications, talking about yourself. But what would be the point? I personally wouldn't even say it is unfair if companies filter for young candidates without family or money issues that way. It just is what it is. People without family or generally more spare time also need jobs.
Another way to look at it, think of job interviews like a date. It is not a one sided thing. How much "testing" would you accept from date? I once had a company call me in for interviews four times (each time costing me at least half a day). Imagine a date telling you after three dates "I'm not sure if I like you yet" - how much more would that make you want to invest into those dates?
Problem with "work assignments" like this is that there is completely assymetric skin in the game on this. I don't know if you have sent this same task to 1000 other people or just 3.
If everyone who did the interview was being paid, you can at least assume that they are moderately serious about your chance of joining the company.