I've enjoyed reading this article a lot; it's poignant and reminiscent.
Yes, I know your feeling as I've encountered in my professional career(14+ years) companies like these. I can tell you outright that this was a real job production task. Some companies tend to include real job tasks in their assessment tests for job applicants. I can go as far as saying that sometimes even the job vacancy itself is fake; it's an awry back door to get some free work from job applicants without paying for it. The promise of the task not to take a few hours is just a troll to entice the applicant to accept to do the job.
I learned the bitter way(after being bitten by similar traps a couple of times) to reject such assessments right off the bat. I can go on and on and list stories from my own experience similar to yours. The good thing however is that you hopefully learned what to accept or reject when you're offered an assessment task for a job application.
I've enjoyed reading this article a lot; it's poignant and reminiscent.
Yes, I know your feeling as I've encountered in my professional career(14+ years) companies like these. I can tell you outright that this was a real job production task. Some companies tend to include real job tasks in their assessment tests for job applicants. I can go as far as saying that sometimes even the job vacancy itself is fake; it's an awry back door to get some free work from job applicants without paying for it. The promise of the task not to take a few hours is just a troll to entice the applicant to accept to do the job.
I learned the bitter way(after being bitten by similar traps a couple of times) to reject such assessments right off the bat. I can go on and on and list stories from my own experience similar to yours. The good thing however is that you hopefully learned what to accept or reject when you're offered an assessment task for a job application.
This's another vibrant article along the same lines as yours: gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companie....