For nearly two months they interviewed internally for a strategy role: six conversations, a take-home assignment, and a final presentation to a panel. On the Monday, they were rejected. The feedback was that it had been very close — they simply needed to keep working on their “executive presence.”
Then came the request. The hiring manager messaged to ask whether they would spend an hour walking the person who got the job through the take-home, because it was “the clearest framing of the problem.” They wanted the editable file afterwards as well. The assignment had eaten most of a weekend — the research, the analysis, the recommendations were the actual work, dressed up for a brief that asked for something visual.
The wrinkle: they already worked there. This was not an outside candidate being asked for free labour and walking away; it was a colleague being asked to hand their rejected work to their replacement, and to keep working with everyone involved afterwards. Which is why, they wrote, the reply they were actually thinking of was probably not a good career move to send.