The 'Quick' Take-Home Assignment That's Actually 8 Hours of Free Consulting

saw a post about a 'quick take-home' that was, on closer inspection, a full marketing strategy for the company's actual upcoming product launch. quick! for them, sure — they're getting a free deliverable. for the candidate it's a saturday.

define 'quick'

'quick take-home' has become one of those phrases like 'business casual' that means whatever benefits the person saying it. a 30-minute exercise is a skills check. a multi-day project that happens to solve a real problem the team is currently stuck on is a freelance gig you forgot to pay for.

the line between a test and a deliverable

here's the tell: could they actually use what you make? a fake dataset, a hypothetical scenario, a sample that gets thrown away — that's a test. asking you to audit their real funnel, design their real campaign, or debug their real codebase — that's work. if the output has business value to them, it has a price, and 'exposure' isn't it.

and the candidates who can most afford to do eight hours of free work aren't necessarily your best candidates. they're just the ones who weren't working a second job or caring for someone that weekend. unpaid assignments quietly filter for free time, not for talent.

what a respectful assignment looks like

keep it under an hour. make it obviously hypothetical so it can't double as free labor. tell people roughly how long you expect it to take, and mean it. and if you genuinely need a large sample of someone's real work, pay them for it like the paid trial project it is. it's not complicated; it's just that 'free' is very comfortable.

the way you treat someone's time before they're hired is the single most accurate preview of how you'll treat it after. a respectful assignment is cheap. the reputation for assigning weekend-long freebies is expensive, and candidates are keeping score.