The startup’s founder posted on LinkedIn that they were hiring. The candidate reached out, had a great first conversation, and was told the next step would be meeting the founder and the CEO.
That meeting went well too. The role, the candidate was told, was still being defined — the company was early-stage, and the job would be whatever the team needed it to be. Then came the ask: come in for a two-day office trial, nine hours each day, so everyone could see how you work.
The candidate did the trial. Eighteen hours of unpaid work for a role that did not yet exist. At the end, the startup said no.
The numbers do the talking: two rounds of interviews, eighteen hours of free labour, one rejection. It is the small-startup version of the take-home assignment economy — a process that asks a candidate to perform the job before they are paid for it, and then declines to hire them anyway. The founder got a look at how the candidate works; the candidate got a look at how the company decides. Only one of those was worth eighteen hours.