A recruiter reached out to me and conducted a phone screen.
Next, they asked me to do a "visual design exercise" which asked me to redesigned their home page. The directions were so convoluted that it took me a full afternoon/evening just to decipher what exactly they wanted in the redesign. They also sent me the assignment on a Friday morning and asked me to send it in by Monday morning, and I felt it was unreasonable for them to ask me to give up my weekend on such short notice. On the plus side, they let me extend the deadline, so they were flexible.
All that aside, there were huge red flags here for 2 reasons:
1. Not sure why they are asking for a visual design exercise for a UX role. Of course, it's important that UX designers have a visual eye, but to structure an entire time-consuming activity around visual design for a UX role is a huge indicator that they don't understand what UX is.
2. Asking an interviewee to redesign their home page is extremely exploitative. Designing a made-up app for the sake of understanding design processes? Sure, makes sense. Asking for a new home page design for THEIR company? That's work you are asking the interviewee to do FOR FREE. There are no protections against them taking your design and using it.
At this point, I had already decided that I was not interested in such a company. However, I ended up going ahead and doing the redesign, because I really wanted experience with conducting a whiteboard exercise, which would have been the next step. The icing on the cake was that they ghosted me after thanking me for submitting my visual design. Never heard back from them after 8+ hours of free labor. Thanks for your professionalism, MAQ Software.
Also, on their website, they state that they give you two books written by the CEO upon hire and that they "advise you to not accept our position unless you have reviewed the books." This, on top of the Glassdoor reviews that consistently refer to the CEO as Mr. Lastname and praise him in fluffy, abstract ways is also strange to me.
As an interviewee, it was difficult to find substantive information on the company, and the interview process + the cult-like attitudes around the CEO just seem fishy and gross overall.