For as long as I live, I'll remain baffled by this experience.
Here's a little advice for you hiring managers out there. When you encounter the perfect candidate, you don't insult them by ordering them to perform free work, nor do you subject them to an "approval by committee" cross-examination. You offer them the damned job.
This occurred in January 2015. As I said in the ATH post, I was lucky I could walk away from this nonsense as I had just received the offer to return to Fidelity (albeit that was a bad decision, but that's for another post). Seven months later, in July, I saw the exact same job advertised again. I emailed the HR rep asking if this was the same job for which I interviewed last winter; I received NO response. I concluded that this job was completely fake. My guess is that they were using the interview process as a means of soliciting free design ideas that they could then pass along to the design firm with whom they were working. Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve encountered this, which is why I absolutely refuse to work for free as part of the job application process. The only situation where I work for free is for a charity or as a favor to a close friend/relative. I do NOT work for free in exchange for you to maybe think about possibly becoming interested in considering me. Had they offered to compensate me for completing these projects at my freelance rate or even hired me as a contractor for a week I’d have embraced this opportunity to prove I was more than qualified for this job. In summary, just another very sad display of how the hiring process in this country has deteriorated.
Of course, I have a sneaking suspicion that had I been twenty years younger I'd have been immediately hired.
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.