How unscrupulous companies are taking advantage of the downturn in the tech and media sectors
An article in Wired, “Tech job interviews are out of control”, confirms an unpleasant trend my own students have been telling me about for some time: some unscrupulous companies are turning job interviews into an opportunity to get candidates to provide valuable work for free.
A week ago, an MBA student told me about his experience with a selection process that involved spending several days creating content for a social network the company was involved with. Expecting people with many years of professional experience to do this is nothing short of exploitation along the lines of “so long and thanks for all the fish” .
At a time when tech and media companies are laying huge numbers of people off, some unscrupulous companies are asking developers to, for example, “build a desktop application from scratch, connect it to a backend system mockup, and thoroughly document every single step”, or “develop and document a new feature for your current application”. Projects that sometimes take several days, for which candidates are not paid, and that, after delivery, the company may very well keep and use them after simply telling the developer that he or she has failed the selection process.
These recruitment practices are simply a way to get candidates to work for the company for free. This is something that no one, no matter how interested they are in a job, should accept, and which should also be rejected and made public. Be very careful with these types of unethical and unscrupulous companies, capable of taking advantage of a market situation to exploit qualified labor and get free work: nothing good can come out of a professional relationship with a company that does things this way.
(En español, aquí)
